Cyborganic

» see cyborganic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, which is about four years after the thing on this page had already happened and one year before it stopped. Cyborganic belongs to the short window when the commercial web was being invented by maybe two hundred people, most of whom could walk to each other's apartments.

It started in 1993 as a living arrangement. Jonathan Steuer, Jenny Cool and a handful of friends took apartments on Ramona Avenue, a one-block street in San Francisco's Mission district, because sharing a net connection and a dinner table seemed like the same project. Thursday Night Dinner became the fixed point. People who came to eat ended up building HotWired, Wired's online side, and the first versions of CNET and a long list of other sites, which is why the place gets described as a commune and functioned as a labor pool. Steuer had run the launch team for HotWired himself, the first ad-supported magazine on the web.

The Cyborganic Corporation was incorporated in October 1995 to turn that into a business: a web design and hosting firm with its own paying member community attached. Membership started at ten dollars a month and included a web page and email on a machine named erehwon. Mailing lists were twenty-five dollars a year. You wrote to [email protected] if something went wrong.

~ the record ~

~ 654 mission street ~

On 10 September 1996 Cyborganic announced it had closed a first round of seed capital, from private investors in San Francisco and New York and from a small group in Tokyo, and said a second round would start as soon as it finished moving. Six days later it moved into 654 Mission Street, 10,600 square feet across three floors around the corner from Moscone Center, eight thousand dollars a month, with a public cafe planned for the ground floor. The press release called the net something more than a giant strip mall.

The second round never came. The San Jose Mercury News went through the books in August 1997 and found $710,000 spent, more than $400,000 of it on credit cards and other debt rather than cash, against $50,000 raised from a friend in 1995 and $230,000 from family and friends in 1996. A further $200,000 had been promised and never arrived. More than fifteen venture firms had seen the plan. Nine full-time employees existed for a total of four weeks. By the last week of August 1997 the company was being evicted from the Mission Street building.

~ erehwon ~

The eviction did not take the website with it. On 10 June 1998 cyborganic.com was still serving the Cyborganic Gardens front page in full, purple letters on a dark green strip, with its two feature sites listed: Geek Cereal, described as the daily adventures of seven real-life infoserfs, and The Couch, episodic group therapy in New York City.

The next time the crawler got there, on 17 January 1999, the whole site had been replaced by six lines of plain text. "Erehwon is coming back soon. If you are seeing this instead of the content you expected, it means the administrators of this site are still working to correct a major problem with the server. please be patient. We hope to have things back to normal by the end of the day." It was signed by the Cyborganic.org admins. Nothing came back. By 28 April 1999 the page read "You have reached cyborganic. Some people may or may not be found here," and that was the whole document.

~ what is still answering ~

cyborganic.com is parked at DreamHost today, which is the most ordinary fate a domain can have. The .org is not. Ask for cyborganic.org and a web server returns a black page in red text that says, in letter-spaced lowercase, "c y b o r g a n i c", and then: "if you know your party's extension please enter it now." Somebody wrote that joke and has been paying to keep it online for over two decades.

Behind it, archive.cyborganic.org is serving the 1996 site intact. The green background strip loads, the imagemap signpost loads, the Cyborganic Gardens wordmark loads at 432 by 52 pixels off its original path. The company that could not raise a second round has kept its own museum running longer than most of the companies that did.

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