1996: Faludi Daze

It was a storefront on Townsend, I had a 13" monitor but a brand spankin new PM7200 in beige. Jonathan Mergy kept the Local H on da stereo way too much, but that's okay because their hit song, "Bound for the floor" continues to be the only one awesome enough to contain the word copasetic (i like to spell it kopasetic) in the chorus. That word is one of englishes bestest sounding words to me.

I'm in one of those Tofleresque Futureshocks. Social media has connected me with high school, college and other old connections, right? So, its only natural to reminisce. The parallel that Local H represents to me is unavoidable. Here's this Chicago-based rocker who has this prolific song-making, pop sense and he can't find a bass player that can keep up. Instead of prolonging the search, he adds bass pickups to his guitar adds a drummer and takes it on the road. This is bootstrapping a business right? One hit single can propel you to headline tours around the continent.

Twitter is being outed by Scoble and Arrington as consisting of a couple of servers manually administered by employees. Us cracked-up twits are like, "wha?" Is that how you spend your $5M-$15M in venture funding, letting your infrastructure whither away? With all the geek talent hangin around SOMA, how does this jibe? I'm tired of hearing about accidental businesses. Sling Media and now Twitter come to define this for me. As an entrepreneur planning out every last freakin' detail of the business strategy, I find this rock star approach to business planning to be offensive. You're right, I am just bitter, and that the DNA of a good plan will produce no red-headed step children, right? But, I'm a rocker like Scott of Local H. Just plug me in to good vintage gear, give me a drummer who can keep up, and let me roll.

Back to 1996, my co-worker and Mac guru was Jonathan Mergy. He decided that the Internet was too damn nice and needed to get angry. So, the whole Comcast/Arrington story is hardly original. Jonathan details that it was an exercise in DNS hosting and ran the thing on a spare Mac IIci with 8MB of RAM and the commercial webserver, WebStar. Well, it got slashdotted by Netscape's home page and we had to live with an overtaxed ISDN line for a while. But, that server kept going, and companies were pissed that searches yielded results to angry rants from their customers. So, what is old is new again. That's why I'm excited about the rest of this year. I'm gonna change the world freeing the consumer from corporate controlled media in that last bastion of the Content Wars... America's living room. Won't you join me in this adventure when we summon all the great thinkers of 1996 and combine them with the thought leaders of tomorrow.