<nettime> WiReD: One More Thursday Night Dinner

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

     [via <rah@shipwright.com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,52239,00.html
 
One More Thursday Night Dinner
By Paul Boutin

2:00 a.m. May 2, 2002 PDT

SAN FRANCISCO - Now that the dot-commers are gone, it's time to party again.

Members of an influential early Web community will be converging Thursday
night on a cluster of San Francisco apartments Rolling Stone once called
"ground zero in the information revolution."

The event: a revival of the Thursday Night Dinner gatherings --ú TND to
regulars ú-- abandoned amidst Internet mania five years ago.

Attendees will include a bevy of early Web luminaries. Among the likely
faces to show are Apache co-developer Brian Behlendorf and proto-blogger
Justin Hall, two who helped shift the Web from a collection of academic
papers to a personal publishing medium and affordable e-commerce tool in
the mid-1990s.

The weekly dinner parties were started in 1994 by Jenny Cool, a USC film
school graduate who had moved into the apartment building just south of
Market Street. Cool said the sense of community she found in San Francisco
was heightened by the building's high-bandwidth T1 line, a rare domestic
accommodation in its day.

Residents ran cables to nearby apartments to spread the Internet gospel. "I
remember thinking, 'Wow, I've got the Internet in my bedroom,'" she said.
"I used to leave it on overnight just to hear my new messages come in."

Soon after making friends in chat rooms, she realized that "you can't have
a viable online community without an IRL (In Real Life) component. Eighty
percent of communication is extralinguistic. Being able to trust someone
has a lot to do with meeting them face to face."

TND's weekly self-catered theme parties, which ran from 1994 to 1997, were
more potluck than potlatch compared to the high-rolling dot-com events that
drowned them out in the late 1990s. Yet the average Thursday Night Dinner
boasted a higher density of people like Hall and Behlendorf who, rather
than counting stock options, were spending long hours creating everything
from serial online soaps to the first online ads to open-source software.

The scene exploded the following year after Cool and housemate Jonathan
Steuer incorporated it into their new company, Cyborganic, which attempted
to merge online and offline community. "It started as 'drill holes in the
wall and share the Net connection,'" Steuer said. "We wanted to create a
world that existed on both sides of the screen."

For a while, TND was the place to be for San Francisco's up-and-coming Web
workers. Generation X author Douglas Coupland was a regular at the
apartment. Rolling Stone chronicled the scene, as did a German documentary
crew.

The group's momentum fell apart, though, after Cyborganic moved to more
formal offices and then hit financial problems. "The standard Internet
meltdown story," Steuer said. "It wasn't even dignified layoffs -- it just
fell apart. We squandered a lot of the energy."

Neither Steuer nor Cool said they could attend the TND revival.ú Steuer now
lives and works in New York, and Cool has moved back to Los Angeles.

But organizers of the event said they felt the time was right to try one
more time.

Thursday night's theme, "Gold Rush Bums," asks attendees to "dress like
someone from right after any of San Francisco's big crashes: Post
Gold-Rush, Post Silver Lode, Post Gay '90s, the Great Depression, the
Selfish '70s, or the Dot-com Bummer," and to bring a coffee mug from a
failed Internet venture, for filling with a hearty helping of hobo stew.

But TND organizers insist the event isn't a wake for the Web's heyday.
"It's a celebration of the cyclical nature of San Francisco boom-and-bust
times. Pick a recession,ú any recession," said Mike Kuniavsky, a
user-experience researcher for Adaptive Path, a Web consulting firm, who
now rents the apartment.

Kuniavsky and others who rushed onto the Web in the first big wave view the
Internet bust as a welcome bozo filter for removing the carpetbaggers from
their city and leaving behind the true webheads. "The ninety-niners have
gone, but we're still here," one quipped.

Steuer said he thinks the party is a sign the Internet is becoming fun like
it used to be. "I think this is the time when interesting shit happens
again," he said. "It's where we were in '92 or '93, when we were looking
around wondering what would happen, without a plan for how we would end up
on top of the pile."

Above the street outside the apartment, the iconic T1 cable now hangs
lifelessly, finally unplugged this year long after the advent of cheaper
DSL connections. But a flyer stuck to a nearly telephone pole offers a new
sign of the times: "ATTN - If you are the owner of the AirPort wireless
access point called 'Airport BM,' I would like to ask your permission to
make light use of this network either for free or for a small fee."

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