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Really well-written piece. Someone else mentioned Brett Easton-Ellis in this thread, and I totally got that vibe from the early paragraphs on. What really got

Really well-written piece. Someone else mentioned Brett Easton-Ellis in this thread, and I totally got that vibe from the early paragraphs on. What really got me though, was thinking about my earliest days building small Beavis and Butthead fan sites on Geocities, browsing Netscape for hours and waiting five minutes for a certain page to finally load. I was only 12 then, but everything just felt so new and shiny, and as someone else said like it could and would change the world. Having now lived around and worked in tech for a while, stories like these make me feel a bit like I have been punched in the gut. It just seems negative and gross, but in a really captivating way. I connect with what the writer is saying, but also still get butterflies in my stomach when I think back to the 90's and my earliest exposure to startups and internet use. At any rate, just me rambling. Well-done and insightful, I would read an entire novel like this.

drumdance 10y ago
I'm ~14 years older than you. I built a Geocities page when I was 26 and started my first company shortly thereafer. I remember there was a site called the Internet Millionaires List that had a list of all the people who had gotten rich off the Internet. It was still quite short. I think Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark were at the top of the list. eBay had not gone public yet. Anyway, I love that I can remember "before the Internet" as an adult. And I still get excited about all the new technologies that continue to emerge. Companies, being run by people, are inherently flawed. I feel like the writer has low-level depression and uses that to paint everything in a negative light.
kough 10y ago
Now picture someone not quite as old as you, who missed that first wave of internet excitement. They've never had that excitement, and they're the ones graduating college and going west now. I went out straight after high school, moved from the East Coast, did my tour of duty. It's weird because at that age I had no idea what kind of life I might want to live; what kind of lives were even available to live, really. And I didn't have the same dreams you may have had, definitely not the same inspirations. All the aspects of the OP's writing that hit me like a gut punch now were absolutely bog standard to me. Only once I'd left (largely due to depression and burnout) did I realize how far that life is from the life I want to live.

drumdance 10y ago

I'm ~14 years older than you. I built a Geocities page when I was 26 and started my first company shortly thereafer. I remember there was a site called the Internet Millionaires List that had a list of all the people who had gotten rich off the Internet. It was still quite short. I think Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark were at the top of the list. eBay had not gone public yet. Anyway, I love that I can remember "before the Internet" as an adult. And I still get excited about all the new technologies that continue to emerge. Companies, being run by people, are inherently flawed. I feel like the writer has low-level depression and uses that to paint everything in a negative light.

kough 10y ago

Now picture someone not quite as old as you, who missed that first wave of internet excitement. They've never had that excitement, and they're the ones graduating college and going west now. I went out straight after high school, moved from the East Coast, did my tour of duty. It's weird because at that age I had no idea what kind of life I might want to live; what kind of lives were even available to live, really. And I didn't have the same dreams you may have had, definitely not the same inspirations. All the aspects of the OP's writing that hit me like a gut punch now were absolutely bog standard to me. Only once I'd left (largely due to depression and burnout) did I realize how far that life is from the life I want to live.