When I became editor of Wired’s New Economy pages, I did a bit of research to see if I could discover where the phrase itself came from. Turns out there was a New Economy in the sixties, too – when there was also a bull market. For the Wired Index of 40-plus companies that represent the New Economy, we defined the fundamental qualities of the New Economy as globalism, communication, innovation, technology, and strategic vision. These echoed and elaborated on the themes of internationalism, free markets, and information central to the sixties version, as well as Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s The Third Wave. Plus ça change, plus ça la meme chose: in the sixties, the French were having none of this intra-occidental "neo-colonialism," and one Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, deemed the new economics "le capitalism sauvage" – savage capitalism.

If you believe my old colleague Pete Leyden and futurist Peter Schwartz, however, the New Economy, or "Long Boom," really got underway with Ronald Reagan’s first administration. Under the tutelage of techno-evangelist George Gilder, Reagan got New Economy religion early. Here’s the Gipper, circa 1986: "In the new economy, human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. Even as we explore the most advanced reaches of science, we’re returning to the age-old wisdom of our culture.… In the beginning was the spirit, and it was form this spirit that the material abundance of creation issues forth." MIT economist Paul Krugman doesn’t put it in quite such glowing terms. He told Kevin Kelly of Wired that sure enough, technology – human invention – has been the big story in economics since the 1950s, but is also "invoked as an explanation of whatever we can’t explain in other ways."

Yet if there is one moment that defines the New Economy, it came, I agree with author Michael Lewis, on August 10, 1995. This was the day Jim Clark took Netscape public, well before that company (since crushed by Microsoft and bought by AOL), ever made a dime. As Lewis writes in The New New Thing, Clark made this bold move because he needed cash for his high-tech sailboat, The Hyperion. But the result, as Lewis also notes, changed the world of finance. After that day, "the most appealing companies became those in a state of pure possibility. Which is to say that the U.S. capital markets acquired the personal predilection of Jim Clark… The Internet formula for success turned traditional capitalism on its head. Traditionally, a company persuaded people to invest in it by making profits. Now it persuaded people to invest in it first, and hoped profits would follow."

A second paragon of pure possibility Lewis identified in a column for the New York Observer remains one of my high-water marks for the Digital Revolution. The February 7 column concerned a company called NetJ.com. Like a number of failed Australian mining companies which have, without changing their corporate status, made themselves over as dot-coms to better sell their stock, NetJ.com had no real business as a dot-com. In fact, NetJ.com had no business whatsoever – not that this niggling fact kept its stock from increasing seven-fold in late 1999, early 2000.

Assuming the Bloomberg machine was mistaken about NetJ conducting no business whatsoever, Lewis writes, "I went to the documents filed by NetJ.com with the Security and Exchange Commission. There I found the following confession: ‘The company is not currently engaged in any substantial business activity and has no plans to engage in any such activity in the foreseeable future.’"

Laughable as it seems, Lewis notes that NetJ.com does what most Internet companies do: raise capital and make up the business as they go along. "That is the beauty of NetJ.com," he observes. "By doing nothing, it has avoided ruling out the possibility of not doing something else."

To some, including me in a certain mood, a company that has no business and no intention of doing business, but still has a multi-million dollar market cap, exemplifies the promise of the Digital Revolution. Wealth from virtual reality. There are days when I’m too amused to be disgusted; when I think, why not? Wish I’d thought of that!

But there are nervous nights, too, when I seem to recall expecting something else of the Digital Revolution than the ultimate shell game. Nights when I feel like some old hippie lost in the "time fog" of those days on the panhandle – remembering the promise of something different from what followed. Nostalgia, after all, is the most beguiling form of hype.