You have to be taken to Foo Bar the first time you go; you'd never find it on your own. Tucked away at the end of what looks like a fire trail amid dense undergrowth beneath a stand of redwoods some 1800 feet above Silicon Valley, it can't be seen from any vantage point and has no view. That's how we like it, those of us who hang out here late evenings to argue the burning issues of the day, most of us journalists, most of us cynics.
I work here one or two nights a week as a relief bartender. On this particular moonless night, it was as dark as the grave outside, and just as cold. If the temperature dropped another eight degrees, that cold drizzle could actually turn to snow. Customers were huddled over their drinks as though to draw heat from them, and conversation was desultory. Then Joe "Curly Joe" Weaver, a sort of marginal journalist who writes for inflight magazines and drinks cream soda, brought up the Intel boycott.
"It's just the coolest thing!" he gushed. "Privacy advocacy groups are calling for a total boycott of Intel products, until Intel changes its position on putting digital IDs in its chips. You know those IDs could be used to track people wherever they go on the Internet. It's Big Brother! But the people aren't going to stand for it!"
Joe is, denizens of Foo Bar generally agree, insufficiently cynical. But there are cynics and there are cynics. British journalist Laurence "Larry" Wilde manages to express disdain for practically everything with that typically British understated pretension that we Americans mistake for dry wit.
"I'm dry, Michael," Larry said, raising a witty eyebrow and glancing at his glass. I filled it with a chardonnay that left it only slightly less dry. "Granted their cause is just," he said, turning to Joe, "their method strikes me as more than a touch quixotic. A boycott of Intel products? So I don't use my laptop today; how does that hurt Intel?"
Maureen "Mo" McBean is a cynic in the classic American reporter mold. "Privacy" she said, pausing for dramatic effect and to finish off her Haig & Haig, "is dead." She banged the glass down on the bar.
Larry tilted his head to take her in. "It certainly is making a lot of noise."
"That's death rattle," she said, pushing her glass toward me for a refill.
"Death rattle? A typically charming Americanism, but its meaning eludes me."
Joe jumped in. "Has to do with snakes, doesn't it?"
"No, no," Mo murmured. "It's a noise made by a corpse. Sometimes things are louder after they die than before. Like nationalism and Biblical literalism."
"Technically," I said, jumping in before any nationalists or Biblical literalists who might be in the bar could take offense, "death rattle occurs before or at the point of death, not after."
"Whatever. The point is, privacy is as dead as a mackerel."
"Or as dead as Prodigy Classic?" Joe offered. "Prodigy just shut down its Classic service. Blamed it on Y2K problems."
"More death rattle," Mo said. "Prodigy Classic has been dead a long time."
Larry pinched his nose thoughtfully. "Actually, 'dead as a mackerel' may be dead as a metaphor. Some Japanese chap has come up with a way to ship fish alive, using acupuncture. Poke them with a needle and the mackerel or salmon catch a nap on their way to the sushi bar, where they arrive as fresh as if just caught, although, one imagines, a bit more relaxed. Interesting idea, though, that Y2K thing. One could hold seminars on it: 'Blaming Y2K as a corporate public relations strategy.'"
Joe cut in. "There's a bigger threat to the Net than Y2K, you know."
"Marc Andreessen becoming chief technology officer of AOL?" Larry guessed.
Joe shook his head. "No, States trying to regulate it. Predictions are there'll be over a thousand new Net laws proposed this year in State legislatures."
Mo drawled, "Someone should tell them about the concept of interstate commerce."
"Well," Larry said, "if China and Germany and the United States think they can regulate Net content, why not the States? It's a difference in degree, not in kind. Wrong, but not innovatively so."
"Politicians. They're all dead from the neck up," Mo said.
Larry smiled. "Ah, but beware their death rattle."
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com