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By Root 2105 0

its outright rejection. Some were aboveboard and would prove themselves as viable modes of creativity. Others were underground, but they too have proved lasting. What made this possible was not the advent of the personal computer, but the later arrival of affordable and reliable digital networking.28 By the mid-198os, home computer enthusiasts could buy not only an IBM PC, Apple, or other micro, but also a telephone modem to go with it, and they could connect to the first bulletin boards and networks. Rates of data flow were tortoise-like by today's standards, but theywere sufficient for text-only work. Information could be exchanged, and, it was increasingly claimed, communities built. By the mid-i99os, awareness of a single Internet-descended from the Arpanet that had so fascinated Draperwas becoming widespread. The first browsers were arriving to engage with a graphical World Wide Web. The different approaches to property became more entrenched and the opposition between them, if anything, more emphatic. In the process, a link between credit and property that had been forged in the eighteenth century was finally broken.

Indeed, the situation confronting early Net users was reminiscent of that facing authors and booksellers in the eighteenth century itself. Claims about the sacredness of authorship and a new age of reason had been loud and legion then too. Pirates had been attacked for offenses that ranged beyond literal theft and impugned credit, fidelity, and authenticity Practices comparable to what are now termed identity theft or phishing (the imitation ofinstitutions) were rampant. Printed communication was hailed as emancipatory, rational, and enlightened in principle, but in practice seemed riddled with problems. Any community claiming to be constituted by print- such as the public sphere-had to tackle such problems if it was itself to be credible. To solve them required not just laws and philosophies, moreover, but street-level nous. As Kant implied, piracy threatened the basic possibility of public reason by perpetrating a kind of ventriloquism. Similarly broad and deep claims were made about the new digital realm of the 199os. The existence and nature of online collectivities became topics of hot debate. The reality, extent, and epistemic implications of piratical practices were held up as not only challenges to intellectual property-though those challenges were widely declared to be fundamental-but as threats to the possibility of a rational online public. The need to articulate the moral economy of digital networks became acute.

The best known of the early networked communities was the Whole Earth'Lectronic Link, or WELL, a Sausalito group cofounded by Stewart Brand. Before long other online collectives-Usenet, MUDs, MOOs, and the like -were multiplying. The earliest BBS (bulletin board system) was older, having been created by two Chicagoans in the late 1970s as a substitute for swapping cassettes. Some of these groups, like the WELL, were fairly small and localized; others were larger and adopted fictional locations, leading at length to ventures like Second Life." It did not take users long to testify that they felt themselves approaching the McLuhanite dream of having the psyche merge into a global electronic net. More influential language for articulating online communities, however, evoked concepts of community and frontier. Their principal exponent, Howard Rheingold, was aWELLveteranwho came up with the expression "virtual community" in 1987 in a successorvolume to the Whole Earth Catalog. Rheingold's representation of an emergent frontier domain-at once a village full of diverse skills, bound together by an "informal, unwritten social contract," and an unsettled landscape of new stakes and homesteadsbecame probably the most widely adopted model for these pseudosocieties. A prime principle was that members should act like digital versions of barn-raising Amish, sharing information in order to help each other build their online homesteads. But this principle, Rheingold warned, would be sorely pressed