Confessions of a Digerati Wannabe

Maybe it's only in Silicon Valley that Gates and Jobs are referred to as Bill and Steve.

Maybe it's only in Silicon Valley that the acronyms IPO and VC roll easily off the tongues of supermarket checkers and latte makers (excuse me, "baristas").

Maybe it's only in Silicon Valley that I could have become a digerati wannabe. But I did. And I am.

Even before the San Jose Mercury ran a piece about Scorcese being refused entrance to an exclusive monthly Silliwood party, I was hooked. I was well-read in the works of Negroponte, Barlow, Dyson, and Rheingold. I knew who Jaron Lanier was; I scoffed at posers like Douglas Rushkoff, who referred to Xerox PARC as "Xerox Park" in print. I knew about the Well, the EFF, and InterNIC. I'd been surfing the web longer than most.

And then, in 1997, I got a temp job at a place the New York Times has referred to as, "one of Silicon Valley's hottest R&D labs." Oh boy, was I in heaven. There were digerati themselves associated with the place. Brenda Laurel, Denise Caruso.

As I read some of their works, I couldn't help thinking, "I could do that." I could wax poetic about the effects of cyber-culture on our daily lives. I knew nouns like "paradigm" and "metaphor," verbs like "spam" and "hack," adjectives like "digital" and "interactive" (...heck, with some programming assistance I could just create a random digerati-modal speech generator ... ). I read Wired. I saw Derek Powazek speak. OK, I wasn't a full-fledged geek, but I'd been around the block of bytes a time or two.

I even found myself wanting to write a scholarly paper exploring the themes revolving around Data's encounters with various artificially intelligent life-forms and the moral dilemmas faced by the Enterprise in determining the rights of these creatures. But I digress.

I'm a digerati wannabe, and that's probably all I'll ever be. I don't own my own start-up, have my own column, or pull down three figures an hour as a consultant. Yet.

But seriously, folks, it's not the house in the hills, the European luxury car, the latest super-tech gadgets. It's not the fame nor the fortune I want. It's the chance to converse intelligently with people who care about things that others consider arcane. That's all I really, really want.

(And if that last phrase made you want to Slap a Spice Girl, you can't, because the site has retired.
You can still give Ginger a special makeover, though, and find out why we think she needs one.)