“Ivan” is a well-credentialed psychopharmacologist in New York City who helps out for free. Dr. Ivan Goldberg doesn’t prescribe drugs for people online, but he will report his own experiences with them after many years of practice. He has a knack for coming up with angles that patients’ own doctors might miss. After months on Prozac, a man found his work slipping. Ivan Goldberg told him of a new way—successful here, it turns out—to treat the problem.
Goldberg is online two hours a day “as a way of paying back for the thirty-plus good years I have had from my work with depressed people.”[[1.3]] After several years on the Net helping virtual support groups, he has won the respect of hundreds and perhaps even thousands.
Still, Walkers compare notes with each other and don’t accept even Ivan Goldberg’s opinions automatically. Just as if they were talking over the office watercooler, they weigh the validity of the information themselves. But what a collection of facts! When a new antidepressant shows up in Canada or the United Kingdom, Walkers learn about it many weeks before the news reaches the daily papers in the States, assuming that word makes their daily newspapers at all.
Many of the best conversations, however, aren’t about drugs or the merits or perils of electroconvulsive shock treatments. They’re about other Walkers. Remember the gay Walker in Iowa who was so quick to welcome newcomers and answer questions? Well, here’s his obit: Died of complications from diabetes. How about the fellow on the East Coast, the programmer who never logs on with a name? Is he okay, after his last suicide attempt? Is somebody going to drop by to visit him in the hospital? What about such-and-such’s cat? How’s your new girlfriend? Is your landlord being reasonable? The questions and answers fly across the wires. Walkers may not be as famous a virtual community as The WELL, Echo, and similar bulletin board systems with Net and media connections, but it’s hardly as if the luminaries of those places enjoy a monopoly on Caring.
Later that morning I hear Cliff Stoll push his book on WAMU radio. It’s a slaughter; the call-ins run against him by at least five to one. I even feel a little sorry for him until I remember that the technophobes at many bookstores may outnumber the technophiles. The full title of the book is Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, and it should be just the ticket for Luddites and Snubbites with spare change. I myself have Second Thoughts about his Second Thoughts. Early on in his book he says: “I look forward to the time when our Internet reaches into every town and trailer park.” But his true emphasis comes through. Just how much of a technopopulist is he in the end when he claims that networks will “isolate us from one another” and “work against literacy and creativity?”
What’s really freaky is that a woman from Walkers or a similar discussion group—out of all the thousands on the Net—calls up The Diane Rehm[Rehm] Show and ever so politely shreds the arguments that Stoll has made in Oil. A few years ago he wrote The Cuckoo’s Egg, a wonderful book about his battles against errant hackers, and parts of Snake Oil do ring true, but oh how wrong he is about the more cosmic issues. Confronted with the Walkers-style example, Stoll acknowledges that, yes, maybe the Net could be of use to people who need support. After all, the very anonymity he’s assailed can work in favor of honest dialogue. Exactly. One of the glories of Walkers, however, is that depressed people can be as open or nameless as they want. What’s more, they can even go Face to Face. Several Walkers near me, for example, will spend hours and hours talking in person with others dogged by this scourge of Lincoln and Churchill.
Dave Harmon is the man behind the Walkers list. He’s a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard grad, bearded, bespectacled, and a little on the heavy side, as he describes it. I learn that he works as a programmer for a company that writes software to use with mice—the computer kind. His depression is moderate. Come the middle of the night, he may wake up in a cold sweat; he can also suffer flagging energy.
Several years ago Harmon was crouched in a Boston bus shelter, enjoying a break from a crowded but rainy New Year’s Eve celebration, when he took out a notebook and wrote a poem. “I am the Walker in Darkness,” it read in part, “I am the bringer of light.” The next day Harmon called the company that had hooked him into the Internet—he wanted to start a list for depressed people interested in art and magic. “The thing that makes the Net so powerful is that you don’t have to get into a big deal to start a minor newsgroup or a mailing list.” The newsgroups and the mailing lists can precisely reflect Netfolks’ interests, loves, and fears—much more closely than, say, CBS or the New York Times, or even niche programs on cable.
Oklahoma City and the
Ban-the-Bomb-Manual Panic