Illustration by Oates and Todd Grimson

On a nervous night, sometime in 1971, Raoul Duke, the Kerouacian alter ego of Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, reflects on "the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation of, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant… We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave." Yet just five or six years on, the gonzo doctor notes, "you can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

The operative metaphor of the Digital Revolution, thanks to Wired’s founding editor, Louis Rossetto, is not a towering tsunami, but a Bengali typhoon. Even so, Raoul Duke’s lament is relevant anew: San Francisco in the middle nineties was also a very special time and place to be a part of. We had all the momentum. We were forging new worlds.

And yet, for at least three years, a few friends of mine (many of whom are dot commies with "executive" somewhere in their titles, and all of whom at one time covered the Digital Revolution as reporters) have been engaged in a sort of parlor game where the object is to be the first to look West with the right kind of eyes (and our tongues firmly in our cheeks), and see the high-water mark – the place where the flood waters of the typhoon lapped and, finally, receded.

I suppose it’s our version of the punditry that follows any "correction" of the Nasdaq – all those columnists certain that this time, this reversal, proves that the boom has gone bust. But it doesn’t, really. Few of us believe the dot coms are more than symptomatic of the boom, and besides, they’re all startups, so of course a few won’t make it. As new media pioneer Stewart Brand told me recently, "Personal computers had a bust, a major shakeout, in 1984. Then they really boomed, and they only became uninteresting around 1992. For the dot coms, this year is 1984, not 1992. I know of no one in the biz–who’s serious–who thinks the commercial Internet is even remotely over."

Nor do my friends. But our game (and I’m not sure if the other players would even call it game, it’s entirely casual and played out in email, usually with articles forwarded with that nifty "email this article to a friend" feature ) finds us more interested in the absurd, the ironic, the Greil Marcus secret history type moments.

These moments are almost always appended with our brand of arch hyperbole. Each, in email acronym short-hand, is its own proof that we’re facing TEOTWAWKI: The End Of The World As We Know It. It’s further proof that by falling for and promoting the Digital Revolution, we unleashed a monster–and now look what it’s done! Many are fairly local, having to do with the effects of the Digital Revolution on San Francisco–once a city that media people had to leave if they ever wanted to make any money. An equal number have to do with dot-com business schemes, making me suspect that the Digital Revolution and New Economy are really the same thing–the Digital Revolution just the window dressing for the e-commerce that followed.

For Duke/Thompson, the beginning of the end of the Rising Tide of Youth in the sixties came at a parade in Berkeley, California in 1965. A melee broke out between some Hell’s Angels and some anti-war protestors. This was fours years before Atlamont, but, as Duke/Thompson notes, "This proved to be the historic schism… It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Long Hairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of the SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/middle, Berkeley/student activists." For me, TEOTWAWKI-as far as the spirit of the Digital Revolution is concerned-began to reveal itself in the fall of 1998.