Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

At the same time, his friend Hans – another failed student from the Anna Göldin-Gymnasium – decided that he would also apply. As large as Herbert was small, Hans was a skinhead whose mood-changing drinking habits and aggression made him a dominating force. His real love, however, was more sublime. ‘I wanted to be a poet, a voice in the world,’ he remembers. He had spent his teens writing acres of poetic rants that he described as WORDWAR. In ‘Reality’ he wrote, ‘my brain is splattering in the flames’ and that he was suffering ‘the permanent reduction of the physical-body functions, the retracting of the limbs, mutilation of the extremities, medical dependence on the higher lifeforms in the body’. Much of his poetry was nonsensical, testosterone-fuelled adolescent ranting, but it had energy and force nonetheless.

The relationship of Herbert and Hans was intense, borne of teenage enthusiasm for each other. Together they felt much stronger and more likely to succeed than they did on their own. Though they were not lovers, they behaved like a couple – finishing each other’s sentences, sharing confidences and trust in one another. Hans had a kind of immediate and spontaneous courage that fired Herbert up, and in the past they had goaded each other into doing increasingly outrageous stunts. But their friendship masked a rivalry and was, in part, an expedient alliance. ‘I know that I am greedy,’ says Herbert, ‘but Hans is endlessly greedy. I always said that, if you let him, he empties the buffet without caring about other people.’ Hans remembers, ‘We decided to be friends rather than enemies.’

Enthusiastically the two forged plans of how they would conquer Vienna together. Herbert used an illustrated portfolio of the HIRN-lein project to gain a place in the graphics department of the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. Hans was determined to be radical, so chose not to submit any images to the same department. Instead he presented the text of the WORDWAR poems and was summarily rejected.

Despite this set-back, Hans and Herbert were not ready to give up their desire for a common future and Hans moved to Vienna anyway. They were so short of money, though, that they were forced to share a tiny bedsit, which they crammed with their video cameras and computers. They formed another association, Elastic Worldwide 4D, which was little more than the name and their enthusiasm; days and nights were spent taking drugs, making computer animations and talking about their future. And at some point they discovered the Academy’s department of visual media, run by Professor Peter Weibel, a man whose strange role in the seventies art scene they found very appealing.

Weibel had been a member of an art group called the Viennese Actionists, a bizarre descendant of Dada. The Actionists performed some of the most unsavoury and sadomasochistic public performances to have ever been described as art. One member of the group was arrested following a performance during which he sang the national anthem while masturbating. Weibel himself was led around the centre of Vienna by another Actionist, Vallie Export, on a lead as if he were a dog.

Herbert and Hans applied to join Weibel’s department together, but were required to submit their portfolios as individuals. Both boys were offered places and both were delighted. But by the autumn of 1994 this was not enough. They wanted to create a larger vehicle for their ambition, and felt that their combined skills alone were insufficient for them to make it to the big-time. So they decided to gather together a group of like-minded friends.

Herbert’s HIRN-lein collaborators were also interested in doing something else. Alberto continued to study architecture; Thomas, to everyone’s surprise, had enrolled at law school, but felt uncomfortable with his conservative colleagues; Juri was still an apprentice electrician and was desperate to give it up.

Herbert also got in touch with a couple of other friends, who had lent a hand at the beginning of HIRN-lein: Peter, a singer and charmer, and Franco, a keyboard player and guitarist, both of whom used computers to make and record music. Aged fourteen the pair and Herbert had founded their first club, the Gesellschaft für professionelle Amiga-Anwendung (GPA) – the Society for the Professional Use of the Amiga – to feed a shared enthusiasm for Amiga computers.

The Amiga computer was released in June 1985. The lineage of the computers dominating the market at that time could ultimately be traced back to the telegraph; the user could communicate only in letters and numerals, typing in complicated commands that would appear on the monochrome screens. By contrast Amiga was the first truly multimedia machine, with capabilities for sound, moving images and colour. At the launch Blondie’s Debbie Harry sang along to one. The computers were marketed under the tag line ‘Only Amiga Makes it Possible’; even Andy Warhol was said to own one.

The Amiga was never very popular but did develop a cult following. In a forerunner of today’s free-software movement, Amiga enthusiasts created an entire set of publicly available software which they distributed via bulletin-board systems and through small-advertisement sections in the back of magazines. And, in the mid-1980s in Switzerland, Herbert and his friends Peter and Franco jumped on the bandwagon. They produced a regular fanzine for their pro-Amiga society and recruited hundreds of members from around Europe – mostly from behind the Iron Curtain, where kids were desperate for contact with the computer magazines and software of the West. The society eventually disbanded, but the three boys remained friends.

While the others were provoking Zürich with HIRN-lein, Peter and Franco had set off on a pilgrimage to the heartland of world rave-culture: Manchester. The place was engulfed by the latest, ecstasy-fuelled dance phenomenon – Newsweek even splashed its cover with the city and its clubs, under the title ‘Madchester’. Peter and Franco had gone there thinking that it would be the perfect proving ground for their band, SuperSex, but they landed in the most violent part of the city, Moss Side. They met a lot of musicians, but nobody really understood why they had come. ‘We wanted to feel like pop stars – at least for a couple of months,’ remembers Franco. They finally ran out of money and their immigration status became perilous. Back in Zürich, both were only too happy to hear from Herbert.

In the early autumn of 1994, Herbert sent an invitation to his chosen friends, requesting their attendance at a meeting in the Swiss resort of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. Herbert titled the invitations ‘The Company – The Family’ and outlined his and Hans’s ideas for possible collaboration. The front of the invitation asked, ‘Fun, money and the new world?’ On the back was the icon of an attaché case in front of an emerging and radiating sun, in the centre of which was a dollar symbol.

The Magnificent Seven – Herbert, Alberto the brainy architecture student, Juri the shy hacker, Thomas the muscled law student, Peter and Franco the musicians, and Hans the radical poet – piled into two cars and drove the two hours from Zürich to Weggis. A century previously, Weggis had been an opulent resort that had played host to royalty and celebrity. It was also the place where Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada, had come to break away from the tradition of representational art.

Amid an alpine landscape of old farmhouses, stables and orchards, the location for the meeting was an eyesore of a seventies concrete apartment-building. The borrowed apartment might in another time have been the location of a family holiday – happy snaps taken on the long balcony, the snow-capped mountains as backdrop.

As the boys rolled out their sleeping bags and cracked open beers, they were still uncertain as to what was about to happen. Their motivations and aspirations were a confused desire for fame amalgamated with a determination for political change and a belief in the power of art. All seven of them shared a rebellious sensibility, wanting to poke fun at and denounce the overbearing and monotonous tone of the society in which they lived. They all hoped that this meeting would produce something new and innovative that would further their collective anarchistic take on the world. More than anything, they hoped they could find a way to control their own destinies, to save themselves from dull, office-bound careers. Like young men the world over, they were also in search of visceral excitement and both emotional and geographic adventure. As Herbert puts it, ‘All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.’

For a week they sat around the dining-room table in the holiday apartment and deliberated about their future. Everyone had been asked to prepare a paper to present to the others about their special interests and aspirations. Herbert submitted his thoughts about commercial sponsorship. Hans spoke about corporate identity; he admired Andy Warhol and the way he had used the aesthetic of commercial art to satirise and celebrate advertising. Peter, the plastic pop-boy, and Franco, his tall charming collaborator, talked about music and the use of multimedia, and about their desire to be pop stars, like David Bowie, the Sex Pistols or Madonna. Alberto lectured about Archigram, a 1960s collective of architects who became famous for their visions of ‘plug-in cities’.

The arduous meetings lasted for up to eighteen hours a day. The atmosphere was combative and exhausting. ‘We were searching for ideas, but it was no fun at all,’ Peter recalls. ‘The process of creating a group with these people who are so different was very strenuous.’ For Alberto, the very impossibility of agreement was the purpose. ‘It was a test, whether we could manage to spend one week together. It had a symbolic character,’ he recalls. Herbert taped all the meetings with a cheap video camera, convinced that they would later have some historical value – and because they all wanted a record of them in case arguments broke out in the future about what had been agreed.

The group acknowledged that, in this ‘multimedia’ world, becoming ‘pop stars’ or just being ‘artists’ would not necessarily guarantee their success. They spent hours discussing their collective view that the world was undergoing a ‘multimedialisation’ – by which they meant that the separate disciplines of text, images and sound were collapsing together, since all now relied to a greater or lesser degree on computers. The co-operation between artists of different media was required. They saw the success of manufactured boy-bands and avant-garde art groups as a demonstration of the need for some kind of collaboration. Also they had all witnessed the power of their combined forces in the clubs that Herbert had so avidly formed in previous years: the HIRN-lein, the Society for the Professional Use of the Amiga and – to a lesser degree – Elastic Worldwide 4D.

Instead of a club they decided to form a corporation. Says Juri, ‘We were kids who pretended we were doing business.’ Previous generations might have blanched at such a commercial take on youth rebellion. But this group felt no guilt. Capitalism dominated the world and had just ‘won’ the Cold War; the Berlin Wall had crumbled only a few years before. Indeed, brands – of sneakers, in fashion and music – were often the heroic icons of the moment. ‘We were fascinated by multinational corporations – millions of people, one name, one brand. Like Sony,’ says Alberto, who especially admired anything Japanese.

For these young men it was as if there was no alternative to ‘a company’ as an engine of ideas, cultural change and defiant rebellion. The bickering, political correctness of the Old Left in the squat and in the radical Anna Göldin-Gymnasium was hardly a compelling alternative. Indeed it was clear that the furthering of their opinions would be better done by creating a corporation and a brand than by employing the outdated and singular methods of music, art or literature. This was how to triumph in the nineties.

It was as if they were going to turn on its head the behaviour of big-brand corporations that ‘steal’ the cool of rebel music and the élan of street fashion for marketing their burgers, sneakers and clothes. As a lyric of Peter’s favourite band, Chumbawamba, said, ‘They think it is funny turning rebellion into money’. Now Herbert and his friends were going to steal from the power of the dominant corporate ideal and turn it to their own defiant ends. And if it could make some kind of profit too, then all the better.

The boys set out to codify this ‘just do it’ philosophy into the constitution of their corporation. But they could not finally do away with the collectivist ideology employed by the protesters and squatters. They agreed that on the inside they were to be a collective, that no one would have any hierarchical power over any other, that everything was to be agreed by democratic vote. Once a rule was agreed it would be followed like a corporate diktat, and policed with determined and aggressive diligence. The first rule to be instituted was that no one was allowed to eat during meetings – it was considered ‘unprofessional’.

Despite this theoretical agreement, in practice Herbert exerted his influence. ‘He was very much in the centre of the group because he established the rules,’ remembers Franco. ‘He was the only one that still had energy at the end of the day, when everybody else was totally exhausted. These were the moments where his opinion got accepted by the rest of the group.’

Since part of the group would be living in Vienna and the others in Zürich, they also discussed their modus operandi. They felt that they were in need of what they called a ‘virtual office-system’. Juri, the hacker, suggested that they might use the Internet rather like a special kind of phone or fax machine, for swapping information – just a boring utility. Like most of the rest of the world, the others had little idea what the Internet was. By 1994, the Internet still had a comparatively small number of people connected to it, and the majority of those in the backwaters of the scientific-research community, in the corporate offices of Silicon Valley, or in localised enclaves, like the rave scene in San Francisco.

Juri knew his way around the Internet, but it was far from simple. The software that was used, such as it was, had been written inside the academic computer-science community and was not really intended for the average home-user. Getting online was hard in itself, and asked for dogged determination. Modems were expensive and their installation involved the typing in of many seemingly random and complicated series of numbers and letters, user names, and passwords. Mistyping meant failure to connect, with no friendly error-message – often just a blank screen. The difficulty of the logging-on process cloaked a uniquely powerful network that was about to leap into the public consciousness.

The network’s success owes much to one man, Jon Postel. By 1994, he had twenty years’ experience – first as a graduate student and eventually as a professor – writing and editing a number of key documents that formed the foundations of the Internet. These described how computers would be able to communicate with each other. The Internet is not so much a radical new technology but rather a set of brilliantly written rules that computer scientists call Standards. These rules are consistently applied by all computers across the network; without a set of Standards computers live on the Tower of Babel, unable to speak to each other because they do not share a common language. Like the internationally agreed size for cargo containers, or the regulations of the Universal Postal Union, Internet Standards are not especially complicated – but when the network grew large and ubiquitous it became an extraordinarily powerful way of trading information.

The first Standards were written in the late 1960s in response to the request by an obscure research agency, the Applied Research Projects Agency (ARPA), associated with the American Defense Department, that wanted, apart from anything else, to communicate at a time of war. Since then the Standards have been improved and clarified through a loose network of computer academics and consultants, nurtured and corralled by Postel and a few others. To begin with, the few constitutionally appointed organisations and the culture were very much in line with the T-shirt slogan of one of the central bodies, ‘We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.’

The Economist once proclaimed that, ‘If the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel’ – and, with his long hair, bushy white beard and open-toed sandals, he does have the look of an Old Testament prophet. This Professor of Computing at the University of Southern California was a product of the hippy movement, and the key Internet Standard, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), of which he was the co-author, chimed with his personality. Enshrined within the code was a dislike of central authorities and the promotion of individual freedom. Previously computer networks and telephone systems had depended on a central commanding authority – even making a local telephone call requires dialling a central exchange, which then routes the call back to the receiver. The US military thought this was a vulnerable way of setting up a communication system. The network that TCP/IP governed was to have none of this.

The Standards of the Internet were to eschew this kind of centrality. It was to be a network in which every computer that was attached to it was to have equal power and equal value to the network. The TCP/IP Standard was remarkable because it gave no favour to those computers on the network owned by corporations, governments or the powerful. As a consequence any computer could, in theory, attach itself to any other that would transfer information ubiquitously.

Most surprising at the time, the Standards rejected the dominant technology of networking: switches. A telephone call, for example, requires a continuous electrical circuit to be switched on – via switches at the local exchange and all the exchanges along the route. In contrast the idea of the Internet is that information – be it a voice stream, like a telephone call, or a graphic image or a text document – flows through the network in a series of discrete pieces. To send a large piece of information it is first divided up into ‘packets’ and then sent separately to the destination computer, where it is reassembled. The system has the power and flexibility of a central Post Office and, as with the postal system, every computer on the Internet has an address. These addresses, twelve-digit numbers, are unique. Also like a mail system, the Internet would collapse into chaos if the same information could be directed to two or more post boxes with the same address.

These two elements of the TCP/IP Standard – the distributed and equal network, and the sending of packets – make it rather like a ‘Mutual Post Office’, a co-operative movement of which anyone can become a member provided that they pay a small fee and follow the rules of TCP/IP. At its inception, the system offered several obvious advantages. For a start, it could not be destroyed by knocking out the central sorting office or telephone exchange; the packets of information could route around any temporary obstruction. The network could also grow like wildfire without the need for studious bureaucrats to diligently design and then control it. To become a member of the Mutual Post Office, one simply needed to attach a computer to another already on the network and agree to play by the rules.

The mutuality had a radical cultural impact. The system’s lack of control and regulation defined the early incipient Internet community. As wrote Kevin Kelly, former editor of WIRED magazine, ‘The US government, which indirectly subsidizes the Net, woke up one day to find that the Net had spun itself, without much administration or oversight, among the terminals of the techno-elite. The Internet is, as its users are proud to boast, the largest functioning anarchy in the world.’ This anarchy would not be easily controlled by governments, corporations or even by lawyers. Indeed, over the coming years it seemed as though the Internet’s many conflicts and lawsuits had their foundation hard-wired into the mutual details of this technology.

In the concrete building in Weggis, Juri and Franco were charged with getting the company on the Internet as a cheap and practical form of communication between Zürich and Vienna. Nobody considered the Internet as an important new medium, let alone as their new company’s focus or platform.

Eventually, after days of debate, the friends also managed to agree on a name, Combination-Combination, which was supposed to express their intention to combine the efforts of different people with different specialities in different places. It was in the universal language of hip youth – English – and contained an allusion to their technical know-how.

They decided to raise the money to fund the setting up of the necessary infrastructure and offices by servicing the rave scene, using their many multimedia skills to contribute to the experience. Five of them could contribute to this venture: Herbert, Hans and Juri were to create images to project on club walls using computers, and musicians Franco and Peter would compose sounds. The others were to think about their possible contribution to the larger group project – it was hoped that this would be the first step towards something bigger.

On the last evening in Weggis the group staged the official founding ceremony of Combination-Combination. They were thrilled that the bonds of old friendships were now united in a common destiny. In the meadow in front of the apartment they lit a firework and toasted their future with champagne. Franco, who had been given the position of the group’s ‘specialist in human resources’, was designated to make the official speech. He told the others that he hoped ‘we would succeed in shaping not only pioneering new technologies but also promising human relationships. And that we were a very special team and would be able to do so.’ Even today, Herbert goes into raptures when he remembers the founding of the group that he would so relentlessly drive. ‘It was a magic moment when all these brains came together to form a common will.’

Back home in Zürich, Thomas – the law student – wrote his first business letter, to the company founders. It contained a budget and asked everybody to send 5,000 Swiss francs (£2,000) as their individual share of the founding capital. ‘Dear Business Partners,’ it read. ‘How each one gets hold of this money is his private matter (fantasy and creativity!).’ With the money, the boys rented a tiny room in an empty office building and set about making parties happen.

Soon they were asked to provide the visuals for a rave in Basel. Dozens of TV screens were dragged into an old factory, where Juri hooked them up to his computers and fed them whirling graphics. The friends all wore the same clothes for the event, a uniform of a black suit with a Pepsi logo on the sleeve, pointedly turning the brand on itself.

After Basel, Hans and Herbert returned to Vienna and convinced a nightclub promoter to hire them. The plan was that Juri, who remained in Zürich, would produce the visuals on his computer and then send them down the line directly from one computer to another.

The day before the party, Juri set his computer in Zürich to dial the computer lab of the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, where Hans and Herbert were waiting. Nowadays computer files containing graphic images and animations amounting to the equivalent libraries of data are regularly swapped across large distances. Juri’s graphic file was tiny by comparison, but that did not make his task any easier. In Vienna Hans and Herbert watched as the line was connected and part of the file was slowly transferred. Then the connection broke, and Juri had to start again. It was a frustrating process. The boys were worried that failure to get the images on time would put their careers as party organisers in jeopardy.

Four hours later, the pictures arrived. The group knew that neither their nerves nor their wallets could cope with this sort of lengthy international transmission, so they found a more old-fashioned way to go about their business. From then on, when in similar straits, Juri would take out his computer’s hard drive and tape it to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zürich to Vienna. Herbert or Hans would wait at the station to retrieve it.