This morning I gave the same order, over and over, in every direction: make it less about me.
The objects of the order are two websites, scibe.org and item8.org, preservation editions of two collaborative hypertexts from the conferencing years—My Name is Scibe, written on ARTS WIRE and the WELL in 1994, and Item 8, written on The Meta Network from September 1997 to August 1998. Both editions are now complete in the way books are complete: the works themselves, read aloud; indexes of every person, place, and song the texts name; glossaries; FAQs; long context essays about the rooms, the software, and the village; bibliographies that run past eighty sources apiece; and acknowledgements pages that name the debts the way a book does, at length and by name. Like any museum—the line is mine, and it is printed on one of the sites—the art is only part of what makes them interesting. The rest is the world the art was made in.
And the final editorial work, the work of this entire morning, was making sure the museum is not about its curator. I don't want to be centered at all in either site. That was the order, verbatim, and everything since has been enforcement.
On Scibe, enforcement was easy, because the truth does the work. Scibe is Judy Malloy's. She conceived it, she hosted it, her name stands first on the 1994 copyright line, and her pages at the WELL kept it readable for thirty years while the rest of the web forgot it existed. In July of 1994 a car ran into her leg in a Tempe crosswalk and broke it in about fourteen places; she began the work from a bed, on a laptop lent by Xerox PARC, and the collaboration that answered her was, in her own framing, hoped for but not asked for. So the edition is now, by my order, a Judy show—one hundred percent recentered on her. The seven of us who joined her are honored exactly in our places: writers in Judy's house.
My place, to be precise about it, is third in the byline, and I am an author of Scibe; I don't surrender that, because surrendering it would be its own lie. The DNA are in both works, and they're my DNA, not just Judy's. But I wasn't the headliner, and I wasn't the stagehand in black setting up the sets, either. I was a character actor in the play—and looking at what I wrote in 1994, I might have over-acted. Both halves of that sentence stand at full weight, because the rule I set this morning cuts both ways: no false modesty. An anti-hagiography is not an anti-biography. Distortion in either direction fails.
On Item 8 the enforcement took vocabulary. I opened that item on September 2, 1997, explicitly to recreate Scibe on a different network; I coined the word it travels under, coelaboration; and I wrote sixty of the two hundred twelve responses that survive, the largest single share. Those facts stand, all of them, because they are facts. What comes out is the role language wrapped around them. On that site I am catalyst, facilitator, co-writer, and ensemble member—never leader, orchestrator, or composer. I rolled a snowball and it rolled down the snowy mountain gaining speed and mass and momentum. The rolling was mine. The mountain, the snow, and eighteen other pairs of hands did the rest.
The register for both editions, set this morning and now saved where my agents can be held to it, is this: as close to reporting as print allows; an anti-hagiography—but with flowers. Reporting decides what is true. The flowers decide how completely a person's earned credit gets told. Judy gets her record whole, including the costs. Lisa Kimball—who founded the Electronic Networking Association in a Greenwich Village loft in 1985 and walked between every room in this story—gets hers. Charles Roth, who wrote Caucus, the software both works were written inside, and who wrote its web language in a single month in 1995, gets his. Nobody gets a halo. Everybody gets their specifics.
A friend of mine in Kentucky has had a standing line about me for years: “You think everything is about you, Chris.” She is not wrong often, and this morning I finally built her correction into the architecture itself, so that no future editor of these sites—me included, on a vain day—can quietly re-center the curator. Presence in the record is not centrality. The monument goes; the witness stays. My recall is in both editions, labeled as what it is: testimony, one man's memory, hedged exactly where I hedge it. I don't want any of it erased. I just refuse to let it pose as the story.
Because here is the truth about the method, and it is older than the websites. In many cases even Item 8 was me harvesting other people's creativity in order to make something. I am a trellis for creativity's vine. A trellis grows nothing; nothing climbs without it; and the fruit belongs to the growers. That is not humility. That is a job description, and it has been mine in every room I have ever worked.
I learned it from my father, or in his presence, which for a son is the same education. We were working in Puerto Rico, he and I, and the job required a room full of Midwestern General Motors parts men to get up and join a conga line, which Midwestern parts men, sober and watched, will not do. So I jumped up first. I acted the fool and the jester, I danced around, and I made such an ass of myself that the arithmetic changed: nobody in that room could possibly be more of an ass than I already was, so joining cost nobody anything. They joined. My father told me afterward, in substance, that it was the proudest he had ever been of me—besides the scuba diving, which is a different kind of going first. Self-humiliation, deployed on purpose, is a catalyst. You spend your own dignity to buy other people's courage.
It is also, I have come to believe, the whole of my public writing. I say the drinking in public. I say the fear, and the fucking, and the tiredness, and the insecurities, in public, at my own expense, first—because I like to think that saying it sets the tone for what other people might be brave enough to share. The condition stays attached to that claim, as it should: I like to think it. Some of my friends may not realize any of this is a strategy; I might be giving myself too much credit. The rooms did fill, though. The snowball did roll. The line did dance.
Which leaves the honest deficit, and both editions state it plainly. Right now they rest on documents plus one witness, and the witness has SDAM: I do not relive my past, I look it up, and some of the tapes are thirty years old and shedding oxide. These books cannot be considered real—not finished, not corroborated—until the voices of the people who were actually involved are in them. So the door stands open, and it is printed on both sites: if you were there, in the conferences or the classroom or the company, your memory belongs in the record, attributed, in your own words, beside ours. Hope O'Keeffe, Ginny Little, Scott Burns, the nineteen, the eight—this is your invitation as much as anyone's. Scibe's acknowledgements and Item 8's bibliography are where the debts and the sources stand; the colophons carry the address.
This aria, meanwhile, lives here—on the weblog, and in a fuller, fireside telling on The Chris Abraham Show—because these are the platforms where I am glad, super glad, to be centered and to sing. The museums stay museums, and their curator stays in the colophon, third in one byline and one of nineteen in the other. A trellis, happy with the vine.