RADICAL CARE

Sustainable technology demands attention to human context as much as engineering and code

By Claire L. Evans

Stacy Horn was 33 when she started her little online community. It was 1989. In those heady days before the Web, online still meant a Bulletin Board System, or BBS: a text window that you dialed on the phone and paid for by the hour. They were popular on the West Coast, but Stacy is a native New Yorker. So she named her community ECHO, the “East Coast Hang-Out.”

She hosted ECHO out of her apartment in Greenwich Village, on a stack of modems surrounded by toy figurines, loose papers, and photographs. To entice new users, she scouted art openings, gigs, and readings in the city, and tried to sell interesting people on the then-alien notion of chatting with strangers online. She put out snarky ads in art magazines. “When the voices in your head are not enough,” read one. “Echo has the highest percentage of women in cyberspace,” read another. “And none of them will give you the time of day.”

Before the Web, women made up a vanishingly small percentage of the internet population. Using a female identity in early social spaces like BBS often led to immediate harassment, so many women opted for gender-neutral or male aliases as a way to avoid fuss. As a consequence, it was genuinely hard for women to find one another. But Stacy’s community was 40 percent female, making it one of the earliest online spaces to be hospitable to women in the slightest.

For Stacy, this was purely a business decision. “In those days journalists wrote that I started ECHO to provide a safe space for women on the Net,” she wrote in 1998. “Bite me. I wanted to get more women on ECHO to make it better.” She wasn’t creating a refuge or making accommodations to a vulnerable population. She simply knew that more women meant more perspectives, more interesting conversation—and on an online service whose success was predicated on providing compelling conversation for its users, that translated to a better product.

Stacy was right. For a time in the early ’90s, ECHO was the hottest thing online; even John F. Kennedy Jr. had an account. Her key insight was that the internet needed a population of interesting people, not just the nerds and engineers who built its backbone. She deliberately recruited users from non-technical spaces and even taught Unix classes out of her apartment so that a lack of technical knowledge wouldn’t hold any of them back. She created private spaces on ECHO so people could gather in smaller groups, and women could privately report instances of harassment if they needed to. She spoke to feminist groups about the internet and organized regular in-person meetups to keep the community from flaming out. And if a woman ever left her service, Stacy would call her personally and ask what happened—an inconceivable act of sincere concern at the scale of today’s Web.

ECHO still exists today, which makes it one of the oldest continuously-operating online communities in the world. Stacy never sold, franchised, or placed ads. She never indulged in the fantasy of an IPO, even though plenty of her peers in dot-com-era New York made millions doing much less. She never made the jump to the Web. She never got rich or famous. But her accomplishment remains enormous: Stacy achieved gender parity on a then-male-dominated Internet and her platform has actually remained online, nurturing its small but devoted family of users because Stacy has cared enough to keep it alive.

These are alien notions in our time. Care? If the word means anything in Silicon Valley, it’s the passion of a start-up founder: someone who cares a lot. Caring means investing in a new idea, grinding, taking big risks. But what Stacy Horn’s legacy represents is caring of a different sort: not only caring about a software platform but caring after it, and continuing the commitment of care beyond the pitch and into the tedious, workaday realities of a technology once it has been built. Continuing to care even after a product ceases to turn a profit, caring well into its obsolescence, even caring enough, when the time comes, to put it to bed gently and to say goodnight.

Such care is unglamorous and frequently unrewarded; if done well, it’s invisible. It’s a respectful conversation; a safe environment; a well-maintained piece of infrastructure. The reason our entire banking system didn’t collapse with the coming of the year 2000 is that a generation of legacy software engineers came out of retirement to patch pervasive bugs in its underlying computational infrastructure. Today we tend to think of the “Y2K bug” as a blip—an overhyped techno-fake-out—rather than a concerted act of thankless maintenance. With such little recognition to show for the work, no wonder, as the late Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

In technology, professional domains associated with maintenance and care, like the administrative labor of keeping a database updated, or the never-ending battle to keep social spaces online moderated and free of harmful content, tend not to be considered “technical.” But care is very much a technical skill. After all, software is a mechanism by which human beings facilitate tasks for other human beings. In order to do so effectively, one has to understand the task at hand, the mental model of the people approaching that task, the context in which they exist, and how to translate the messy realities of human life into code. One has to determine whether the tool solves a problem or simply creates new ones. One has to go beyond simple metrics of growth, stickiness, or market share and consider implications like mental health, community, civic life, and society at large.

Social skills are essential in all of this. And by social skills, I don’t mean “getting along with others.” I mean being able to see a technological object as inextricable from its larger social context, from the world of users whose lives it touches. And ultimately, yes, I mean caring what happens to those users, who are—after all—people.

The podcaster and writer Dan Sinker has aptly named our moment the “Who Cares Era.” As in, who cares if these student essays were all written using ChatGPT? Who cares if the professor grading them leverages the same AI tools to lighten their workload? Who cares if our feeds are filled with slop? Who cares if a smart device someone relies on is bricked without warning after the company that makes it is acquired by Google? Who cares if social media’s financial incentives encourage inflammatory and racist content? Who cares if Grok goes full Hitler?

Online, we are surrounded by weaponized indifference, by a generalized aversion to anything as potentially cringey as sincerity, and by the pervasive sense that passable—passably human, passably ethical—is good enough. In this context, it can feel as though we’re too far gone to care. But, as Sinker writes, in the Who Cares Era, “the most radical thing you can do is care.”

Caring cuts through the noise. As Stacy Horn might say, bite me. It’s not a question of virtue. Users are drawn to things which vibrate with the care put into them. Users are, after all, people.A few hundred people still actively post on Stacy Horn’s little corner of the internet. To do so, they must register by snail mail, brave an archaic Unix interface, and revoke instant gratification.

ECHO is not a success story as a business, but it is an invaluable living archive and an unbroken connection to the skeletal origins of social media. This resilience is its own form of success. The remarkable survival of Stacy Horn’s community through decades of tumultuous acceleration, through the rise and fall of hundreds of other online services, platforms, and communities, is due entirely to her willingness to <<maintain>> what she built—to care after and preserve something whose value is as unquantifiable as life itself.