Dr. Dobb's Journal August 1999
You are not the sort of person who attends this sort of event. A jacked-in friend, a canceled project, and some unexpected free time have conspired to bring you to this South of Market warehouse filled to the rafters with noise, newsies, and nanotalk.
You just barely get in. Your friend Knows Somebody Who Knows Somebody, but at this event, you actually have to Know Somebody. Fortunately, the Somebody Who Knows Somebody whom your friend knows turns out to be a Somebody in her own right, at least for the moment. Her 15 minutes having conveniently kicked in, you are ushered through the waiting throng, the velvet rope drops, you get your ID checked and your hand stamped with a tattoo that contains a Java applet for acquiring drinks ("It's your barcode," the hand-stamper says), and you are In. Inside, it's insane. It's Trackball 99, the annual cyberspace analysts and reporters and industry trackers ball. Ultra-exclusive. Cyberchic. PC Forum meets Studio 54.
Your friend has disappeared already, leaving you to fend for yourself. You need fortification for the fending. You hold your hand up to a reader at the bar to get your barcode read, but it's the wrong bar. Only munchies here, your tattoo flashes, this is the menubar. Something beeps from the vicinity of your sacrum, and when you turn around, an R2D2 lookalike offers you a drink, identifying itself as a sotbot.
Drink in hand, you mingle, or at least mill. The technopress are easy to spot: They're the ones with canapés in their pockets. Mainstream media types who've managed to cross over, born-to-be-wired newsies, Drudgeabees, countless random ziners.
But the crowd is by no means all media: There's a liberal sprinkling of digerati; little groupings of webgrrrls, gearheads, cypherpunks, and the black turtleneck crowd who inhabit SOMA, as South of Market is called by those who deal in acronyms. That's really who's here tonight. The nongovernmental dealers in acronyms. Technoids of all subspecies. As you pass a clump of neopagans who've brought their own mead and are wearing matching T-shirts that read "We're the alt in alt-dot," you feel a sudden chill and wonder: Did a vulture capitalist or angel investor pass by just then, masquerading as a mortal?
Feeling the call of kindred wallflower spirits, you drift over to where other lurkers are loitering by the punch. It's an IBM 029 brought by some hardware otaku (i.e., collector) and there's a bowl of chad -- the confetti produced when punch cards get punched -- next to it. Your ears begin to pick samples from the ambient rainbow noise. A journalist you know vaguely from MegaMicroWorld is telling someone that POTS is snailephony.
"I'm a professional iconoclast," a disembodied voice from somewhere in the crowd says, "I do Linux programming." And you catch the disembodied reply: "Every iconoclast becomes the prophet of the next iconomy." You realize that you don't know whether these people are being profound or clever or asinine. But it occurs to you that being glib, knowing the right acronyms and buzzwords, being able to talk the talk, is probably enough for many of them. Like Wall Street in 1928 or Haight-Ashbury in 1968, everybody in this cyberculture is drinking the same Kool-Aid. Merely talking the talk gets you in, and once you're in, a certain amount of money, fame, and glamour comes to you through osmotic pressure. There's so much of it around that it's hard not to soak some up. In the long run, it's better to walk the walk than to talk the talk, you are convinced. But standing there in the middle of it, it's hard not to be seduced by the Trackball mentality. Maybe the long run has had its run. Maybe long-term planning is pointless in a world that is reshaping itself daily. Maybe the only durable strategy is to be a shockwave rider, catching the current curl, seeing only as far as the coming crest or trough. If so, skills and achievements may be less important than demonstrating that you are on top of the current trend. But you doubt it. You suspect that this wave is going to break eventually on some reef of reality. A rising tide lifts all boats, even unseaworthy ones, you think, standing there next to the chad bowl.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com