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I once helped create a community where we agreed to start everything from scratch. In Monopoly, they say “return to Go,” and that’s what we did in terms of both the social and physical manifestations of our living situation. We agreed to invent our own village and our own infrastructure. We borrowed from models that we knew were archetypes – houses, roads, water systems, communications – and we built them, using “pre-owned” materials and equipment, according to our own idea of what local economy and self government should or could be. We were true “amateurs” – lovers of whatever technology and practices we could adopt.

We made plenty of mistakes, of course; none of us had ever done such an audacious and difficult thing in our entire young lives. And, as we discovered our mistakes, we made corrections. It was slow work. We had no formula or method for iterative lifestyle development. We didn’t have the luxury of funding for planning and r&d, so we had to live with our errors, sometimes, for years. Looking back on those years, most of us can see where we went off track, but it’s too late now for do-overs. The community disbanded for the most part in 1983.

In 1986 I began managing an online group discussion system called the WELL. Again, we were a group of people with some basic resources to share and work with. Instead of land, we had disk space. Instead of saws and tractors we had UNIX and a database program that structured our conversations and privileges. And, again, we were starting from scratch, inventing our own community. But in this case, we could make mistakes and fix them almost instantly, at least in some cases. It took us a couple years to be able to afford to replace the original CPU, which was ill-suited to multi-user sessions. But in terms of improving the features of our online social environment, we could make changes pretty quickly. As newcomers to what was then known as Cyberspace, we were amazed at the malleability of our digital village. And that was just the beginning, whcn a relative few were able to work socially in a software universe.

We tend to get jaded when we spend much of our time on the Web, but if you think about it, we have become acclimated to iterative culture. Our way of relating to one another through this collection of media relies on tools and conventions that are constantly under beta test. No platform, no user interface, is a finished product. Either because of competitive business pressure or the hacker imperative, every product – from the most successful to the striving to be successful – is constantly in flux.

Iterative culture is adaptive, though much of that adaptation may be ill-founded. Not every attempt to enhance, replace or invent offers us practical improvement. Not every brilliant idea gets noticed and adopted by a critical mass of users. There is wasted energy and creativity, and not every successful (in terms of mass adoption) product is the best of breed. But the overall trend of frenetic creativity is a good and necessary thing. Humanity needs this rather than any form of complacency. Looming over us are challenges that demand strong social invention muscles.

Iterative culture demands that many of us buy in and be part of it. If, indeed, the entire Web is a beta test, we are all beta testers, so we should be cognizant of our role and contribute at least a bit to the feedback that is necessary to follow paths to improvement. We have not, by any means, reached the promised land. Our economic system needs a radical overhaul, as do our political and environmental systems. These are much bigger challenges than getting hundreds of millions of users onto Facebook.  But participating in iterative culture on the Web is good practice for a time when iterative culture comes to our regions and neighborhoods.

Like learning to fly an airplane on a computerized flight simulator, we can make mistakes with little damage on the Web, while we learn what it’s like to collaborate on the design and function of our social environment. Resilient communities where we actually live may require a lot more collaborative skills than we are currently exercising. We need the practice.