I didn't set out to create an online zine in July of 1995. Certainly my impetus was not to produce, to quote a phrase I employed later, "a running commentary on Silicon Valley and its excesses." No, my online zine Ad Nauseam was birthed because of an iced coffee. True story!

It was a sweltering San Jose evening. My partner and I walked to the neighborhood cafe to read our books and sweat it out. She ordered sparkling water, as she usually did, and I ordered an iced coffee. What I didn't know was, the owner dosed the coffee with an espresso shot to jack up the taste and the potency—ancient Italian secret. It would not be the first time his premium octane rocket fuel kept me awake all night.

Earlier that month, a friend of mine came into the office in a bit of a rush. It was a Saturday. We worked for a Silicon Valley startup coding device drivers. I was performing actual work that day. He was not. I could tell because over the cubicle wall I heard him ah-ha'ing and congratulating himself and so forth. I sauntered next door and asked what was up. He showed me something pretty damn cool.

It was a pseudo-SLIP, a fancy name for a clunky bit of hackery. We both had dial-up Internet accounts to access email and to read news and such, but this was in the days when you used a terminal program to do these things. You logged into a UNIX shell account and typed text commands to read and write text messages. No graphics, no mice, no pop-up windows. You learned to love the command-line. You had little choice—until pseudo-SLIPs came along.

Internet providers charged an arm and a leg for a full-blooded SLIP account; SLIP was "true" Internet connectivity, very similar to the way the Internet is accessed today over DSL or cable modems. A pseudo-SLIP made a cheapie shell account "look" like a SLIP connection. Like I said, it was clunky, but work it did.

I purchased the pseudo-SLIP software online with my credit card—it was my first online transaction and I thought it was as dicey as all shit, but what the hell—and that very night I was surfing with an early browser called Mosaic. It took all of four minutes to realize the World Wide Web was—to employ a technical term—The Shit. Science fiction had been promising this for years. It was Star Trek without the dancing green naked women. Then I clicked on a link and—lo!—dancing green naked women.

Up to that point, the Internet had been a playground for hackers and geeks and nerds. For the Joe Six-Packs of the world, the very sight of the UNIX command-line prompt looked like a giant step backward. Didn't we get rid of DOS with Windows 95? they'd ask. Why would I pay a monthly fee to log into DOS?

Mosaic meant anyone could use the Internet. This, I realized, was a profoundly good thing.

It also meant corporations were going to gang-rape the Internet. Advertising was verboten on the old Internet; it was more of a gentleman's agreement than a strictly enforced policy, but the agreement had held up well for a number of years. On the new Internet, advertising would become the norm. This, I realized, was a profoundly evil thing.

What the hell could I do about it though? I wrote device drivers for a living. I was no superhero. Superheroes are heard. People listen to them. Superman was a journalist, for Christ's sake. Even without the flying and speeding bullets and all that, he at least had The Daily Planet to air his grievances. Who would publish my complaints?

I looked at my Web browser one more time. The answer was, as they say, staring me in the face like a pair of tits.

This, I realized, was a profoundly good thing.

With the espresso shot making my heart go like a buzz roll, I sat down at my computer and breathed fire. I'd been on the Internet for seven years; it was one of the few unblemished things in my world. Corporate America was going to trample it with their dirty feet and stink it up with their halitosis. I was high on caffeine and fucking ticked. I wrote a little screed, converted it to HTML, and posted it on my account's FTP space. (The Web was so new, that was the only way I could make it available.) I called it "Corporate crap hits the cyberfan". It was profane. I barely edited the thing.

I went to a few of the nascent Internet link sites—pre-Yahoo! Yahoos—and mentioned the URL to the webmaster. I had no way to know how many people read it, no site counters or traffic reports or any of that. I received a solitary email from a guy who told me the Internet was "vast". I wrote back asking if he was responding to my little screed. He said he couldn't remember.

Undaunted, I polished the layout and blasted out a couple of more ditties, lists of gripes and profane observations and so forth, and added some really horrible graphics. I made a table of contents. It wasn't pretty. It screamed rank amateur. I think that was the attraction for some people in 1995, the polish that made Ad Nauseam closer to shinola than shit.

A few weeks later, Microsoft released Windows 95 to immense fanfare. It looked sharp compared to the operating systems they'd been crapping out the prior fifteen years—but it wasn't the revolution Microsoft and their shills in the press made it out to be. The hoopla was jury-rigged but the criticism was just as wide of the mark, especially Apple's, who predictably groused that Microsoft had ripped them off yet again. Yeah, yeah—tell it to the Marines.

I wrote my next screed in my head driving home from work. Microsoft sucked, but so did Apple for sitting on its ass and waiting for Microsoft to catch up. I edited this one a little more. I called it "No way to lose". Literally, I said, Microsoft could not lose with Windows 95. Not a bold prediction, but a prediction nonetheless, and I stand behind it. (Easy to do since it worked out that way.)

More emails. Not so agreeable this time, and some downright nasty about what I'd written about Apple. Guess what? I liked those more than the agreeable ones.

Two points make a line. Ad Nauseam was born.

I started programming when I was nine years old. In 1980 my parents bought me an Atari 800 with 48K of RAM and a 90K single-sided 5 1/4" floppy disk drive. I wanted an Apple ][+, the kind my friends had, but my parents went the Atari route for long, complicated, and boring reasons. Turns out they chose wisely. Why? Because there was a ton of software for the Apple. The Atari didn't have nearly as much. That meant if I wanted a program, more often than not I had to code it myself. My Apple friends got fat, dumb, and happy playing Wizardry. I wrote my own demon dialers and long-distance PIN crackers. They got a high score. I got a career.

I made a lot of audacious and outrageous statements in Ad Nauseam. I'm going to make one more here. My generation is responsible for the World Wide Web's success today. The dot-com boom was chock full o' greedy bastards, but when the boom sizzled down to a toothless nothing, civilization was left with the greatest communication medium and information repository the world has ever seen. The boom was Darth Vader. The World Wide Web is Luke Skywalker. (Sorry, that's the best I can do.)

My generation has never been properly acknowledged as Luke Skywalker's midwife. (Again, sorry.) The microcomputer revolution of the 1980s formed a generation of solid and skillful programmers. I doubt the breadth and depth of such a pool of talent will ever be seen again. Why? Because we taught ourselves, and not to make money, but out of sheer love of the technology. We devoured homebrew manuals and subscribed to the hobbyist magazines. We hacked. The 1980s were a time between building your own computer from scratch and buying (or pirating) all the software you needed off the Internet. We were right in the middle—the technology was cheap and widely available, but you had to learn the innards to get any semblance of satisfaction.

Those old microcomputers were wide-open machines. You could get right down into the guts and make shit happen. Today the hardware's wrapped in layer upon layer of abstraction and simplification. Those old microcomputers—Apple, Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, TI-99/4A, hell even the Timex Sinclair—those computers were laid out wide open to you like a forty-five dollar prostitute spread-eagled on a flophouse mattress.

For many people the 1980s was greed and bad music and worse hairstyles. This is especially true of the hippies and New Left liberals whose wavy-gravy optimism went sour when they sobered up and saw that the Age of Aquarius never happened. Don't trust the grumps; they had (and have) an agenda. I'm not saying I had a grand ol' ball in the 1980s, but there was a lot more to that decade than Abbie Hoffman or Howard Zinn can comprehend. Those types are so acidic about the Reagan years, they refused to see anything positive or hopeful come out of it. In the 1980s, thirty-plus year-old Abbie Hoffman told college kids about my age that he didn't trust anyone under thirty. Fuck Abbie Hoffman.

America never saw so much brainpower spread so thickly over the land than in the 1980s. Geeks didn't join 4-H or fraternities. We emailed. We swapped coding tips between classes. Sometimes we met on Saturday nights for pizza and root beer. We never bonded the way earlier generations of young men did. As Tyler Durden noted, we had no war to fight or protest together, no economic or political collapse to suffer under. But we were unified through technology, as strange as it is to write that. To call us lone wolves is to romanticize geekdom, but there's something to it.

Pick up a remnant 1985 calendar and find a random Saturday. The number of fourteen year-olds at home that night, locked in their bedroom, their fingers a frantic blur over the computer keyboard, coding and hacking and emailing, would astound you. You simply wouldn't believe it. Beer and pot and getting laid: for so many of my generation, all that got put on hold. Ten years later, we entered the workforce with ten years of programming experience under our belts. The Internet explosion was engineered by twenty-four year olds who knew what the fuck was what when it came to computers. We could code and we could produce. We did just that.

Generation X, the so-called slacker generation, worked its tail off during the boom and was handed a steaming plate of jack shit as reward. The Baby Boomers ran off with the real dough. They derided my generation's success stories as ill-gotten noveau riche slavishly devoted to mammon—kids who prefer Bloom County over Doonesbury, they sniffed. They didn't sing that tune when their own made it big a decade earlier. They said Steve Jobs was a counterculture genius who made an end-run around stodgy navy-suited IBM. This new kid, this Marc Andreessen kid, he's a fat greedy opportunist who, incidentally, helped architect and code the single most important piece of software of the Twentieth Century. At one time, the Mosaic browser he wrote for the University of Illinois was the basis for both Netscape's and Microsoft's browser. You know that pleasant ding the Mac makes when you turn it on? Steve Jobs picked that.

Reading over Ad Nauseam ten years later, I noticed an undercurrent I was blind to at the time. My distaste for the Baby Boomers was a subtle recurring theme in my writing. I've seen someone about it. I'm cured. I'm no longer subtle about it.

I called it Ad Nauseam for some reason. I think it was a pun on advertising. I made a logo, a big yellow ball with ugly red letters. It took me all of eight minutes to do and I never tried to improve it.

I essentially authored the pages by hand. No word processor, just a programmer's text editor and a straightforward understanding of HTML. I wrote a little program called htp. It's an HTML preprocessor. I wrote my screeds in separate files and defined the page layout in one generic file. htp combined everything and produced the web site. To update the layout I just changed that one file and ran htp again.

htp was also the result of that cafe's liquid rocket fuel. I hacked it one night and had the first version ready before dawn. htp still lives—it's included in a Debian release of Linux and has been open-sourced on Sourceforge.net. Please don't ask me about it or its bugs. I built it solely for Ad Nauseam and gave it away thinking someone else could use it. Really, it needs a rewrite. Most everything I wrote from that era needs serious editing. I refuse to reconsider any of it.

In Silicon Valley, everything I saw and heard and did and had done to me was fodder for Ad Nauseam. I wrote about Netscape and @Home and Juniper, fabulously wealthy and famous companies all headquartered within half a mile of the little shit hole I worked for. I drank with their employees at microbrews. I overheard what they said in line at delis. Some were nice people. Most were jackasses with broomsticks lodged well up into their rectums.

I wrote about Fry's Electronics, the sorriest and best example of all-devouring American consumerism. The emails flooded in for "Breakfast at Fry's". I was interviewed by Forbes, Newsweek, Businessweek, and the San Jose Mercury News. One of the Fry's owners called me, in newsprint, something akin to a looney. I loved it. Fucks to you too, pal.

One late-night bloodletting at the keyboard turned into a piece I'm particularly proud of, "The Star Trek Litmus Test". A high school buddy of mine posted it on his office door at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Scientists would stroll by with their coffee mugs, stop, read it, laugh, and tell him how dead-on it was.

What—are you going to argue with a nuclear physicist? About Star Trek?

Some of my stuff was crap. A lot of it was juvenile. Some of it was just plain unfunny. Some of it doesn't make much sense unless you programmed in C++ or understood the basics of the ISA Plug 'n Play specification. I misspelled "Verbiage", the name of one of my zine's sections, for the longest time. When I discovered my mistake I left it as-is as a badge of do-it-yourself pride. I was a poor self-editor. I didn't fact-check. I tried to get other people to write for me—to create a more collaborative zine—but failed to drum up the necessary momentum. I took at stab at fiction to write about Quake addiction and wound up referenced in a couple of thesis papers. I had fans. One wrote me and said I should be putting out new stuff every week instead of once a month. Once a week—Christ, I'm not some machine extruding this shit! Then blogs came along and if it's been six hours since your last entry they think you've had a coronary and can't make it to the keyboard to write about it.

"Breakfast at Fry's" drew the attention of an Internet magazine who was planning an award ceremony for web sites. They wanted it to be high-class, a red-carpet affair; the Oscars for geeks. They called the award a Webby. They held the ceremony at Bimbo's 365 in North Beach. I was nominated in the "Weird" category. I took my girlfriend and two hot co-workers with me and told the doorman they were editors. We drank whiskey sours and danced to primo San Francisco swing music and I lost. That night was fodder, too. Ad Nauseam's readers were treated to a rant about not winning some stupid popularity contest.

I like The Rant. I thoroughly explored The Rant and its stylistic possibilities. The Rant is a valuable component of our nation's literary heritage. Admire The Rant. Honor The Rant. Cherish The Rant.

Here's how I see my time in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom:

I lived in a bizarre and ugly place scooped out of the ground by Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and stuck atop a high-speed roller coaster. Up and down, up and down, turning, swerving, wheels lifted off the tracks, the coaster accelerated and slowed but never stopped—and therefore could only crash. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew the dot-com boom good times could not last, no matter what those New Economy guys said. The conundrum for most people was to bail out at the last possible moment. Jump the train too soon and you'd leave a lot of money sitting on the table. Jump too late and the table's gone, poof, vanished.

I watched a friend of mine light a twenty-dollar cigar with a hundred-dollar bill. (He was too cheap to buy a quality cigar.) He said he'd always wanted to do that. He also knew the opportunity would be lost soon enough. Light up now rather than later when you can't.

I quit my first Silicon Valley startup when it was nose-diving. It essentially cratered a year or so after my exit. My second startup cratered harder than the first. Both worked me like a dog. Ad Nauseam was my after-work escape, a monthly scalpel to vent my spleen before it burst at the office. A way to flip the ol' bird at the morons in charge who kept promising riches and then ran off with the loot. "We share the risks and we'll share the rewards" they used to tell us—utter bullshit. Risks you spread, rewards you defend mercilessly, like a junkyard dog over the only scrap he'd been fed in a week.

The second startup bankrupted in 1998. They literally ran out of money. They said they'd appreciate it if we'd work—get this—for free until the money situation was smoothed out, and then they'd pay us back. People associate the dot-com boom with greed and excess, but as far as I know, no one's mentioned how much fucking gall these idiots in the monkey suits had.

At the last minute the idiots in the monkey suits conned another company to buy us out. To seal the deal they had to keep the "talent" onboard; in other words, the engineers. The CEO offered me fifty thousand dollars cash. In exchange, I would contractually agree to work for the new buyers for the next six months. If I quit before the end of the six months, no bread goes into my pocket. Oh yeah—the new guys could fire me at the drop of a goddamn hat too. Again, no bread.

Fifty grand sounds like a lot of scratch, but they'd promised me a lot more when—never if, always when—we went public. Trust me, the guys at the top—the guys who'd fumbled the ball and screwed the pooch and had to resort to selling the place off for pennies on the dollar—those guys were walking away with plenty. They were to be rewarded handsomely for their failures, as long as they could keep the engineering staff on board until the sale was completed.

I'd taken it in the ass for them for two and half years. They'd worked us sixty-plus hours a week and dangled the magic letters I-P-O before our eyes to keep us chasing our tails for their amusement. All the while they'd made horrendous management decision after decision, letting easy business escape while chasing their personal pipedreams of grandeur. Now they were tossing me chump change to take it in the ass for another six months so they could walk off with cool millions—their reward for cleverly letting the situation get so bad they had no choice but to golden parachute out of the flaming plane. It's not like the economy was tanking at that moment. Remember: this was 1998—the height of the dot-com boom.

I told them where they could cash that check. I was quite specific.

That was when I quit writing Ad Nauseam. I'd spent three years documenting and satirizing Silicon Valley's excesses, and then Silicon Valley revealed to me it was only going to get worse.

I'd said my piece and I'd been heard.

I moved on.