Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘The Wave’ but 90s and NYC

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. New York City’s Silicon Alley in the middle nineties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it was true, everything that can be digital became, Maybe not, who knows…

No explanation, no mix of animated gifs and trendy dot com launch parties with their near endless supply of booze, drugs, and forgotten memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. Astroturf lined bank vaults filled with hipsters talking art and code. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the mission that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Analogue and Antiquity. Not in any violent sense; we didn’t need that. Our technology would simply PREVAIL. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, even 20+ years later, you can go up on a steep hill in New Jersey and look East, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see all the craters at the end of the runways. That place where the seemingly endless wave of VC backed cash finally broke, and rolled back.

…with all apologies and respect to Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘The Wave’