Opening Illustration by Matthew Pamer
3Jane is an exercise in obscurity. A virtual community, it’s analogous to a bulletin board system crossed with a multiplayer online game made up of only scrolling text.
Membership in this community is by invitation only, so you can’t exactly stumble across it by googling. Founded in the mid-1990s, 3Jane originally operated as a sneakernet, a network stored on hardware and moved physically from one computer to another. It has honored its secretive origin in the years since. Some of its more recent former homes include back pages on obscure websites, Amazon cloud servers, and !ash drives that allow members to connect directly to the latest port number.
Formally speaking, 3Jane is a MOO—a (m)ulti-user dungeon, (o)bject-(o)riented online virtual reality environment in which users type simple commands to interact with other users, navigate a series of linked “rooms,” and occasionally build new virtual chambers. This MOO allows its users to monitor grow room efficiency by tracking humidity, temperature, light, and other data through sensors connected to real grow rooms. Certain 3Jane “wizards” (users with the highest administrative powers) can control real-world fans, lights, drip irrigators, and more through a pre-Internet-of-things network written in Python.
For several years, 3Jane also helped coordinate deals across New England and beyond. A few close calls forced it back into more of an enthusiast space, but the advent of legalization encouraged some former users to resume underground work.
To an outsider, it can be frustratingly difficult to pin down. And yet it’s also strangely alluring, a relic from the twilight of a quieter internet.
Evolution of Wintermute
Many 3Jane users are hesitant to engage with press. Those that did either elected to call from masked phone numbers or chose to be identified only by their MOO handles.
My introduction to the MOO came courtesy of Eli Atticus Jager of Vermont, the only member comfortable sharing his name. (His handle is bloom, after Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses.) bloom was invited to join 3Jane in the spring of 2016 after spending several years in Sindome, a cyberpunk role-playing MOO, and LambdaMOO, the first-ever MOO.
After the 2016 election—which emboldened fascists in the United States and gave California legalized recreational cannabis—bloom began an ongoing conversation about a new project with other 3Jane members in Vermont. The outcome of that discussion is Wintermute (yes, another William Gibson reference), a recreational operation billed as an “anonymous autonomous crypto anarchist cannabis collective.”
Drawing on his background in strategy and copywriting—and his upbringing in his parents’ Burlington-based brand design firm—bloom serves as brand director and product liaison. Disinterested in the polished look of other emerging recreational brands, he crafted a glitchy DIY aesthetic for Wintermute. He reproduces the brand’s logo himself every time (an opaque circle sometimes shown askew), and 3-D prints neon-pink containers shaped like military surplus cases for an “apocalyptic, micro-manufacturing vibe.” A glimpse at the brand’s Instagram pro#le reveals esoteric found footage and ghostly distorted photographs of products and growing environments.
“What is everyone else doing?” bloom says. “They’re trying to make cannabis clean and green and friendly—and this cute thing. And that’s not what we’re interested in. So we’re making it a little bit weird and aggressive and grungy, not only because we want to do it, but also because we don’t really know how to do anything else.”
Not Exactly Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
With credentials from bloom, I connect to a limited cloud-hosted copy of 3Jane to speak with dingus, a professional programmer based in Colchester, Vermont, who’s been a member of the community for six years.
The MOO looks like an early chat room. A large green “3JANE MOO” rendered in ASCII art (dingus’s handiwork) sits atop the black console. A sentence beneath the logo reads “be polite, don’t talk about 3jane,” which is either a Fight Club reference or a contradiction for its own sake. An extended description of the “foyer” still doesn’t help me adjust to my surroundings.
“First time?” dingus says, after I inadvertently ignore his prior greeting.
He tells me how to write my dialogue and action, and how to view descriptions of rooms and characters. His image of himself as “a hideously animated cannabis plant” catches me o$ guard. But I quickly acclimate to the MOO’s command language, “nodding and taking notes” throughout our exchange. We aren’t simply talking; we’re inventing a scene.
dingus gives me a tour of 3Jane’s foyer, grow room, and an office. He admits he is showing me a carefully programmed simulacrum, simplified to keep specific information—like real-world plant numbers in the grow room—hidden from new recruits, certain delivery agents, and journalists.
“The [legal cannabis] system is full of shit, a lot of these people. And I think there needs to be a little more acknowledgment that we were defined as criminals. But I never felt like a criminal.”
—pace00
Other members of 3Jane express a blunter stance on the developing legal cannabis market. To pace00, a former dealer who worked out of 3Jane throughout the aughts, legal cannabis is one more way for the same capitalists with “no respect for the plant” to reap all the rewards without doing any of the work, especially as they encroach on the underground market.
“It’s weird to see people talk- ing about weed like it’s kombucha,” pace00 says, noting his frustration with the opportunism of businesses treating cannabis like a hot new trend. He continues, “It’s a hell of a lot harder to set up something like 3Jane and do it well than it is to set up an office and pay for Google ads or whatever. The [legal cannabis] system is full of shit, a lot of these people. And I think there needs to be a little more acknowledgment that we were de#ned as criminals. But I never felt like a criminal.”
When dingus and I finish our discussion in the MOO, he waves to me and crumbles into dust as he logs o$. A few days afterward, I reopen the cloud-host link bloom sent me. My credentials still work, and the MOO’s green ASCII logo and foyer description greet me. It’s quiet now, my own ghost-ship version of 3Jane. I type a message into the void.
“Anyone home?”
Life in the Moo: A Tale
How deep does the rabbit hole go? Where is the line between game and reality? And what’s the difference anyway? I asked myself these questions as the game I played at night turned slowly into a job. Before my eyes, I became retainer to a crypto-anarchist cannabis community secreted away in something called a MOO.
A MOO is an online community–based virtual reality environment navigated entirely with text that became popular in the early 1990s. Sindome, my poison in particular, is a role-playing game in which users play operators in a cyber- punk dystopia making criminal bargains and discovering secret societies. When I began to read whispers of a community of cyberpunk cannabis growers and dealers called 3Jane, it was difficult to tell whether it was more player- made conspiracy.
Eventually, I learned that 3Jane was in fact another MOO entirely, one considerably smaller than Sindome and designed not for gaming but as a utility for the cultivation and distribution of cannabis. While MOOs designed for play like Sindome retain a consistent domain address to enable new players to find them, 3Jane does quite the opposite. There is no unbreakable cryptography protecting the anonymity of 3Jane users; that few know what a MOO is keeps them secret and safe. Security through obscurity is the name of the game here.
With some trouble, I finally connected to 3Jane. To call it an eccentric take on an already-eccentric genre would be accurate. Each element, room, or object is a clever reference to science fiction literature, cannabis cultivation, drug dealing, role playing, the MOO itself, or all of these things at once. A dozen or more users with handles like Z0rr0, Skywalker, and //--\\ walked from room to room discussing the finer points of soil mixture, drip irrigation, and pheno hunting.
It is a fascinating thing being immersed in this secretive and curious world. Over time I stopped playing Sindome altogether, choosing to dedicate all of my digital social life to this new and peculiar place. Frankly, I spent an embarrassing number of hours wandering its halls, meeting people, and learning. I was rewarded as strangers with arcane handles became friends, allies, and business partners.
After nearly a year of visiting this place every day, I saw conversations about growing post-prohibition develop into plans to start a front-facing, aboveboard brand named Wintermute. I was chosen to be the face of the brand and the brand director of this project, for reasons I still cannot fathom.