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By Root 2054 0

convivial. The prime example was radio. Boxing radios had commoditized know-how, he thought, producing "a noninventive society." But in its early days radios had been open and convivial, Illich recalled, and a radio enthusiast (what the BBC had called a pirate listener) had often made every set in the neighborhood "scream in feedback." For Illich that howl was a sign of a kind of freedom that had then been widely distributed, had survived for a while in science ("the one forum which functioned like an anarchist's dream"), but was now almost extinguished there too. He wanted to return to the culture it had signaled. In short, Illich proposed that the "the principal source of injustice in our epoch" was not Vietnam, Soviet communism, or South American dictatorships, but "tools that by their very nature restrict to a very few the liberty to use them in an autonomous way."The possibility of establishing a convivial society rested on opening boxed machines to revive the spirit of those pirate listeners. Intellectual property of this kind must be superseded in order to build the "web-like structures" essential for a free society. Illich was not sanguine about the prospects of achieving this-he mused that only Mao's Communists had the clout to do it. But he nevertheless maintained that "while democracy in the United States can survive a victory by Giap, it cannot survive one by ITT."20

Illich defined a vision for some early digital pioneers, like Felsenstein. Yet, contrary to much hacker mythology, enthusiasts in the early days were never united in opposing intellectual property per se. Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines of 1974, the foremost example of countercultural computer literature, is revealing of the tensions involved- tensions that would end up shaping digital culture itself. A visionary manifesto for the power of engagement with computers, Nelson's book was in one sense a clear articulation of the principle of computer conviviality. It was also, as he put it, a "blatant" imitation of "the wonderful Whole Earth Catalog." Yet at the same time it condemned phone phreaks and copyright radicals alike. "Why is it always the guys with the cushy and secure jobs who tell you tweedle de dee, ideas should be free," Nelson asked. He advocated applying copyright to programs, and advised readers always to append a copyright symbol to their own code. So strongly did Nelson feel on the subject that his Xanadu project-a prophetically grandiose plan for a kind of designed hypertext web-incorporated into its design a form of compulsory licensing. Had Xanadu succeeded, it would have built a particular kind of intellectual property system into the very infrastructure of what became the Internet. It would have solved the network piracy problem by making piracy technically impossible -even while mandating openness at the same time. There was a distinctly Victorian air to the idea. "You publish something, anyone can use it, you always get a royalty automatically," Nelson proclaimed: "Fair." 21

THE DISINTEGRATION OF CONVIVIALITY

The enduring fame of the Homebrew Club derives from its having been the location where phreaking combined with hacking to create a new kind of computer. All participants were welcome to adopt copies of software or hardware designs, as Felsenstein said, on the condition that they brought back more. One passionate advocate named Dan Sokol would even give out handfuls of new chips at meetings. Software was swapped and shared on cassettes, with similar norms to those of home taping. Later, when the Club developed its own relatively formal library of tapes, it had to create artificial rules covering the proprieties of collection and circulation. "The library is really a software exchange," it advised, and members should not "steal" or copy software protected by copyright.22 But at first there had been no such commitment. "It was the same as ham radio," Felsenstein revealingly remarked. And Steve Dompier, a Berkeley electrical engineer and close friend of Draper, made that link clear when he utilized the interference