0.15 Reincarnation  (Page 4/12)

So, the less I wrote, the more I got paid. If this was what “New Economy” meant, I was all for it. I resolved never to say no to any of these people, and accordingly published on a wealth of sites that had extremely short lives. It proved laughably easy to supplement my Weekly salary with these freelance pieces, many of which took less than an hour to write. Before long, my monthly income had increased by more than 50 percent, I was dashing off my “thoughts” for sites that would leap into and out of existence in a matter of months, sometimes weeks, thus sparing me the embarrassment of keeping these things in “print,” and was writing a weekly opinion column for abcnews.com, whose offices were just across Lake Washington, in Bellevue. Judging from what ABC/Starwave was paying me—around $200 an hour, by my reckoning—that site didn’t figure to be in business for long, either.

All over Seattle, freelance writers and cartoonists who had been starving for years were awash in cash. I would run into these people and ask how they were doing, and they would just burst out laughing. The cartoonist Michael Dougan, also feasting off of abcnews.com—mostly by doing caricatures of me—found himself making an adult income for the first time in his life. We felt like con artists whenever we met, both of us taking advantage of the epic stupidity of the nouveau riche kid trying to spend his way to glamour and acceptance across the lake, and our refrain was always the same:

“How you doin’, Mike?”

“I’m livin’ the dream, Baby! And so are you!”

At the Weekly , meanwhile, I was directed to write more or less exclusively on the technology industry and its effect on Seattle. High tech had become the only story in town. That mandate and the crying needs of Web publications had me thoroughly—if only vicariously—immersed in the Seattle technology boom. Between the sheer number of pieces I was writing and the youth and energy of the people I was writing about, 1996 through 1998 went by in a blur allowing me no time to luxuriate in doubt, depression, disapproval, self-loathing—the hallmark emotions of the Seattle-souled. I found myself instead getting swept up in the new Seattle zeitgeist—the chase for the Next Big Thing, the invention or idea or new application that would catch on worldwide and make its local progenitors billionaires. Everyone seemed to believe that the Microsoft story was endlessly rewritable, that Gates’s success was the prototype for a new norm in business. Just as Microsoft had supplanted IBM, so now would some new Seattle entrepreneur supplant Microsoft—a company that was seen increasingly by Seattle’s techno-revolutionaries as representative of the staid computing establishment, the old way of doing things, the past, the obsolete.

I would almost immediately have grown appalled at the greed-to-brilliance ratio in this demimonde, where talk devolved exclusively to the A, B, C, D…rich storyline, all stock options and IPOs, and at the lack of passion for improving the world that I had found in the heart of Bill Gates, had I not chanced one day to visit the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. The HIT Lab, as it was called, was founded by an electrical engineer named Thomas Furness III, a technical evangelist with a tremendous idealistic zeal for bringing the power of computer technology to bear on the world’s most pressing problems.