Howl.com (with apologies to Allen Ginsberg)
2002-07-04 00:44:21 ET

Howl.com
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By Thomas Scoville

I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital,
burned-out, paranoid, postal, dragging themselves through the Cappuccino
streets of Palo Alto at Dawn looking for an equity-sharing, stock option
fix, HTML-headed Web-sters coding for the infinite broadband connection
to
that undiscovered e-commerce mother lode in the airy reaches of IP
namespace, who poverty and ripped Yahoo tee shirts, cubicle-eyed and
wired
on Starbucks sat up surfing in the virtual ether of one-million-dollar,
one-bathroom condos next to the railroad tracks, skipping across the
links
of killer Web sites contemplating ...Java, who rammed their brains into
compilers and saw Intel angels staggering on microchips under the insane
weight of investor expectation, who blew off the search for Truth for
as-yet-undreamed New Economy scams, business models hallucinating
infocapitalist messiahs on clouds of market cap, who abandoned lucid
dreams
of a Better Way for Shockwave fluff and RealAudio baubles dangling from
the
buggy venality of digital commerce, who, while haunted by the scowling
ghosts of hackers past -- Stallman, Nelson, Engelbart -- auctioned their
immortal souls on eBay, with documentation and a full year of support
included, of course, who got busted in their spotless Nike cross-trainers
traveling through cyberspace with a file of illegal crypto for Open
Source,
who ate sushi in Austin or drank microbrews in Silicon Alley, jousting
with
bad mojo funk of layoffs, Chapter 11, or diluted company stock night
after
night, who chained themselves to start-ups for the endless ride from San
Jose to Wall Street on adrenaline and Evian, laptop batteries flaming out
over Oklahoma, no more vegetarian entrees, sir, would you like the latex
omelet instead? endless nights of keyboard grinding and corporate
microwave
popcorn and Jolt Cola until the noise of their own deadlines brought them
down, gawping, convulsing, mute, crushed beneath their own project plans,
who talked continuously about convergence and distributed control and
cluetrains and Y2K and extropians and Libertarians and Microsoft and
Linux
and slashdot and wouldn't fucking shut up, who pointed their browsers at
Red
Herring and Slate and Salon.com hoping against hope that somebody might
be
able to make sense of the infinitely perverse, ball-busting,
soul-scorching,
silicon-supernova black hole that kept them awake all night every night
and
wouldn't let them alone long enough to find dates in this lifetime, who
tattoo'd and pierced and dyed and branded themselves in a desperate act
of
self-mutilating cyber-hepster cool, all the while wearing a suit and tie
on
the inside they could never, ever take off, and praying nobody would find
out about the MBA, who renounced the smokestack relics, the old guard and
their father's Oldsmobile only to find that they had been replaced by
artifacts even less substantial, who chanted the free market mantras of
laissez-faire and techno-darwinism and Adam Smith's invisible hand-job
except when Big Bad Bill the Bully Gates-of-hell came to take away their
lunch.com -- and became Socialists of Convenience.org, who stalked
investment bankers through Bistros and wine bars and martini lounges,
begging pleading groveling for one more hit of funding from the luminous
check-book oh please oh please oh please ah, Bill, you are not safe, I am
not safe, and now we languish in the dot com pressure cooker hoping for
one
last buzz of the old hallucinations. The wrecked avenues, the sullied
conduits, the pinched pipes of a quadrillion dropped and ruined packets.
The
world wide waits, the denials of service, the infinite hosts of hardcore
farm-animal boredom, ghoulish domain-name squatters jumping out from
behind
every virtual tree. These failed revolutions, these paradigms lost, the
end
of Web Time, and P/E ratios good to last the next thousand years. Dot
com!
Dot com! Dot com! forever, and ever, ka-Ching.


2002-07-04 12:14:14 ET

thats pretty good, I still prefer the origional, even though I exist in the aftermath of what is stated above.

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