Growing Old in New York's Snarkiest Early-Internet Community

When I first met my husband, I found that to really be a part of his life, I had to join his online social network. Nowadays this is a familiar story. Many people have friends they mainly or exclusively see online. What’s unusual is that my husband was then already in his 50s, and I wasn’t following him to Instagram or Facebook, but to Echo—a bulletin-board-style virtual community founded in 1990.

Echo was a star of the early internet, profiled in the New Yorker, Wired, Fortune, and The New York Times. It was a party-rich, Manhattan-centric community, and the membership was heavy in media types: artists, musicians, and especially writers. The on “cyber-utopianism” cites three former Echoids: Clay Shirky “inherently cooperative”; Douglas Rushkoff “fosters communication, collaboration, sharing, helpfulness, and community”; and Malcolm Gladwell complaining that activism on social media “favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger.”