THE OBSERVER

Heath Bunting

In theory, Heath Bunting sounds like a Tory MP's nightmare.
An underground artist with anarcho-situationist leanings and
a seriously severe crop, he's doodled around on the borders
of legality for the last few years, trying his hand at
everything from flyposting and pavement graffiti to running
an an avant garde pirate radio station in Bristol. Six weeks
ago, he started up his own computerised bulletin board,
called Cyber Cafe, which is currently frequented by hackers
and anarchists and contains files giving advice on writing
viruses (an interesting electronic art form, according to
Heath). But when he IBM pc you could pick up second hand for
#100 or so. Log on and you can download a variety of e zines
or you can post messages to other members about upcoming
events. There are no programmes or graphics, just text. No
big deal, he admits, but really the board is a gesture, an
attempt to raise interest in his plans to set up a real life
twenty four hour Cyber Cafe, based in Soho, which would
offer punters round the clock free access to the Internet
(via table top terminals) alongwith cappuccino, espresso and
the rest.

"The idea is to create a focal point for the electronic
community in London and the UK in general, and generate a
kind of critical mass, so things start to take off
naturally". And if people spend hours surfing the Net for
the price of a cup of tea? "It wouldn't be a problem. The
idea is to bring the people and the equipment together and
see what happens". What he hopes will happen is that Cyber
Cafe develops into a full-blown mini-virtual community,
offering conferences, real time chat lines, a network art
gallery, and information resources. At the moment he's
looking for suitable premises and negotiating funding.
"We've only had the idea for a few weeks and already things
are happening very quickly. All we have to do is talk
enough, and it will happen."

An appropriate attitude, when you think that the virtual
communities that flourish on the Net are little worlds
literally built out of talk. Not all of it is empty chatter.
As the American psychologist and computer theorist Sherry
Turkle pointed out recently, "the notion of virtual
community compels conversation about the nature of
community". The same goes for virtual reality and even
virtual sex. But even if, by accident, on-line networks have
sparked a nascent, informal public debate about big issues,
it's not much use if the only people speaking are white male
computer science students. Heath is one of a number of
people engage d in the essential labour of broadening the
conversation.

So whilst computer types might see him as an arty outsider,
he could be exactly what the rather insular British on-line
scene needs. After all, even though it boasts more
subscribers than American on-line hang-outs like The Well,
Cix, the UK's best known virtual community has never
achieved a similarly high profile or cultural influence.
(Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that, while the
former is physically based in San Francisco, honorary home
of the New Edge cyber-future, Cix is based in Surbiton, home
of...er, Tom and Barbara Goode).

A thriving Cyber Cafe might do more to shake things up.
Combined with initiatives like the BBC Networking Club, set
up in conjuntion with BBC2's computer programme The Net,
which should be up and running (and offering Internet access
to more ordinary non-computer types) by May, it may even do
something to shake up the British media's rather blinkered
attitudes to networks anbd the culture they're creating. For
the most part, specialist computer journalists here remain
an inward looking breed, who, whenever they hear the word
`culture' reach for their delete keys. As for
non-specialists, they still tend to believe that electronic
culture only happens in America.

Whether a successful Cyber Cafe would help raise the level
of the political discussion around on-line culture is open
to question. Whilst the Information Superhighway was part of
the Clinton-Gore election platform in the States, here the
networks aren't a new frontier. Instead, they're seen as an
invasive threat to national purity, the province of hackers
and crackers who want to crash the system and pornographers
and paedophiles who want to corrupt our children. They need
to be censored, regulated.

One of the main topics of discussion on Cyber Cafe so far
has been the rumours that the government is planning to
bring in a licensing system for bulletin boards which would
force many smaller operations off-line. A knee jerk reaction
on the part of politicians scared (and increasingly
sidelined) by the power of the networks, Heath suggests.
"The Conservatives seem to have only one scale of value -
money", he adds. "The best way to translate the `wealth'
bulletin boards generate into monetary terms is to license
them, make people pay to start them. It's a shame, because
the other forms of wealth they create - cutural wealth, for
example - will die. If all computer networks turn out like
Compuserve, then we're in for a hellish existence."

However, long before any licensing laws are established,
Cyber Cafe will, he hopes, be buzzing, open for business,
and open to all sorts, from hackers to housewives. Things
look bright. But you do wonder whether Heath's
entrepeneurial schemes have prompted accusations of a
sell-out from some of his old associates, for example the
people who frequent the anarchist bulletin board Fast
Breeder. Not really, he says. People from Fast Breeder log
on to Cyber Cafe.

Actually, the distance between the anarchist and the
entrepeneur is not that great, especially in the computer
industry, which seems at times to be in a continual state of
upheaval. Companies start out of garages, make billions and
disappear in the space of a few years. People routinely
unleash technologies with no thought, no idea even, of their
possible social effects. And every eighteen months, the
goalposts shift and the limits of the possible expand,
thanks to the phenomenon neatly summed up by Moore's Law -
the proposition advanced by Gordon Moore, cofounder of
Intel, that every year and a half, the information
processing capacity of a single chip will double

"Capitalism is continual revolution, anyway",

Heath muses. " As for anarchy... I wouldn't want to define
it. But if you want to do something you find a way to do it,
with the least possible threat to yourself and other people.
Some people do things to react to other things. I prefer to
do positive things". In the end his openness and willingness
to engage with the business world seems likely tohave a
greater social effect than the secretive, vaguely paranoid
machinations indulged in on closed anarchist bulletin
boards. Even so, as I'm about to leave, he stops me. "It
might help me raising money, if, when you write this, you
play down the anarchist side and stress the young
entrepeneur stuff." Perhaps. But sometimes in cyberspace,
it's hard to tell the difference.

Jim McClellan - http://www.gold.net/oneday/jim/index.html