Yet many of its earliest members are still there. They’re now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. They’ve been talking to each other every day for 27 years.

Echo might serve as a kind of Grant and Glueck Study for denizens of virtual communities—a longevity survey that can tell us something about the future of the larger social networks that followed it. How has Echo evolved and changed as its members have moved through life? Does online community mean something different to them, 30 years on?

119:4) joe rosen 11-APR-2017 21:05 This can go either of two ways (but more likely option 2): 1) ECHO ruined my life -- i.e. I spent all my time here developing “remote” relationships, satisfying some need for “friends” instead of cultivating a “real life”. OR 2) Without ECHO I’d have no friends (or life) at all, because really I was never going to bother hanging out with anyone in “real life” anyway.

* * *

When Echo was created, the internet was just beginning to be touted as cool. It was before MySpace or Friendster, before Amazon, before the World Wide Web. There was still no faith that the internet had any commercial potential, and Echo’s founder, Stacy Horn, a former telecommunications analyst at Mobil, failed to attract investors to her project, and had to start it with her life savings of $20,000. For the first few years, it was run from her fifth-floor walk-up apartment; for a while, it graduated to a swanky Tribeca office, but it’s back in Horn’s living room today.

At its peak, Echo had 2,000 members. Forty percent of them were women, a considerable achievement in an era when somewhere around 90 percent of internet users were men. Twice a month, everyone was invited to a real-life Echo party, and all the people who came could fit into one medium-sized Manhattan bar.

Horn wasn’t just the owner, but a daily participant, talking openly about her personal problems, her favorite TV shows, what she had for lunch. She dated several Echoids, including my husband, who dated at least a dozen others. The atmosphere was incestuous, intimate, intense. At 3 a.m., despairing Echoids would log in to share their existential doubts; at 3 p.m., they’d talk about the conversation they had at 3 a.m.

The keynote was always high snark. One Echo event was a group reading of the screenplay of Jerry Lewis’s suppressed film about a clown in a Nazi concentration camp, The Day the Clown Cried. Bills from Echo came stamped with the words TOY SURPRISE INSIDE; toys included miniature tarot cards, plastic flies, and plastic “disaster victims”—little people pointing to the sky and screaming and running.

Like most bulletin board services, Echo is broken up into broad topics, or “conferences” (Health, Culture, Pets, Love), which are further broken down into “items.” Any member can create an item, and they’re often created on the spur of the moment in response to an event. Here’s part of a 1994 Culture item called “That’s Life in the Inferno of Postmodernity!” and subtitled “On my TV right now, OJ Simpson is driving down a highway 3,000 miles from me, holding a gun to his head. I am watching it live on TV.”

- - - - - 550:80) Ann 17-JUN-1994 22:56 i don’t understand why he hasn’t run out of gas yet. that car looks like a gas guzzler. - - - - - 550:84) Jonathan Hayes 17-JUN-1994 22:57 Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Ann! The Bronco gets a very reasonable 23mpg city and 30 mpg highway. - - - - - 550:85) Snoop Trouty Trout 17-JUN-1994 22:57 MOM! I’m Hoooome! - - - - - 550:87) doktor dorje 17-JUN-1994 22:57 Some other guy did this a year or two ago and offed himself. HE’s THERE!!!! HE’S THERE!!!!!! - - - - - 550:89) Jonathan Hayes 17-JUN-1994 22:57 I wonder what the camouflaged snipers wear in Brentwood. - - - - - 550:95) Twang 17-JUN-1994 22:58 Ford’s getting some great publicity here. - - - - - 550:96) Ann 17-JUN-1994 22:58 if they don’t let him see his mother i’m going to cry. - - - - - 550:99) Jonathan Hayes 17-JUN-1994 22:59 Will you cry if they let him see his mother and then waste him?

The juvenile and jaded tone already feels like 21st-century internet culture. One can find similar threads on Twitter or Reddit about virtually any public event. In her 1998 book about Echo, Cyberville, Stacy Horn writes, “Cyberspace is one great big Mystery Science Theater 3000.” Still true—and if that’s all social media ever was, it would probably be a mistake to spend much of one’s life there. But then we have this, from Echo’s Central conference, in the item “Breaking News”:

245:166) Stacy Horn 11-SEP-01 8:47 A PLANE JUST CRASHED INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. - - - - - 245:167) Stacy Horn 11-SEP-01 8:49 Oh god. I’m shaking. A plane just went by my window, it was flying WAY too low, and I was thinking, “How ironic, I wrote about this in my book,” and it crashed. Oh God, people are dead now. Oh god.

The conversation that follows this is packed with unmediated feeling and forgotten history. There are rumors of eight hijacked planes, of a bomb in Stuyvesant High School, of a Palestinian group claiming responsibility. There are unmediated expressions of horror and grief. “What will the world be like now?” “I don’t even know if my job exists anymore.” “Many of the people I’ve worked with are dead.” The overwhelming impression is of a group of good friends in a room together, glued to the TV set, talking through their feelings as the world changes outside the windows. It goes on uninterrupted for days.