I’m John Coate. I’m a member of the Edgeryders Board of Directors and am the lead host (AKA Community Manager) for this Internet of Humans project.
My internet career goes all the way back to 1986 when I started as the Marketing Director for The WELL, described by Wired! Magazine in 1997 as “The world’s most influential online community.” There was no name for it back then because nobody had yet done it as a job, but I was in realty the first “online community manager.”
In 1994 I co-founded and managed the first major online news website, SF Gate. We were the first to do a number of things on the web that are now standard. And we were the first to live webcast a major sporting event in 1997.
Later I was Director of Development for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and still later the General Manager of a public FM radio station in California, where I live.
I’ve been part of Edgeryders since 2016.
I have seen first hand the entire arc of the internet with all that is both wonderful and terrible about it. It disturbs me that it increasingly concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a few gigantic companies. This winner-take-all situation is not what we pictured as we were building the various parts of the Internet. I hope that here we will bring out new ideas and paths forward to put the 'Net back to the human-centered place we knew that it could, and should, be.
I live on the north coast of California, in a meadow by the redwoods about 3 km from the pacific ocean cliffs.