Free American Subversive by David Goodwillie Page B

suburbs reaching out like tendrils across a shining landscape of middle-class satisfaction. Sure, there were problems, but I took a long view of history. American prosperity encouraged us to disengage, to stop caring. And so I did.
    I dropped out of school before my second year started and, after several months back behind the bar, found a job in advertising. Grow up around an adman and you can’t help but read taglines, watch commercials, believe in brands. But the business had changed. Gone were the martini lunches and Madison Avenue addresses. Advertising hadbeen hijacked by the Internet and all that came with it—e-commerce specialists, Web-marketing gurus, and inked-up graphic designers—an army of dot-com holdovers still speaking that confident language of the future. I wrote banner ads. During the boom they’d been a source of revenue on thousands of business plans, except no one ever clicked on them. But it all comes back around if you wait long enough, and when a leaner, smarter Internet emerged, banner ads found their place. Everything found its place. The boys at Google made us think again of possibilities. This time it wasn’t all about money. Sure, the staples were still there—e-mail, porn, shopping, stock-trading—but what had finally won the day was content, the scope and speed of available information. Online, people could write anything they wanted. And soon enough they did.
    Derrick Franklin—the man on my answering machine, the voice in my head—was the first to make blogging a viable business. After taking a security-software company public in the midnineties, he moved from Redwood City to New York City and reinvented himself as a new-economy philosopher. He’d earned a cult following by getting out before anyone else had gotten in. I used to see him, bald and sharp-jawed, on CNN, casually explaining the future to those of us who couldn’t yet see it. Of course, it was impossible to be wrong during the boom, but even afterward, Derrick stuck to his vision of a converging world. One day, he mentioned blogs—their importance, their possibilities. Millions—no
billions
—of people would soon be reading these things, and not just occasionally, but continuously—people with specific interests, people who could be marketed to. He looked squarely into the camera and said the numbers were too good to ignore. And he meant it. A few months later, before anyone else knew what was happening, he’d convinced a dozen of New York’s best online writers to come work for him. It was a simple idea: they’d provide the content, he’d provide the site, the paycheck, the health care . . . and the ads, banner ads, the old business model given new life.
    Wino, Drummergrrrl, Cindy from BodyPolitic, Rob from LESismore, Sophie from SophiesChoice. I’d read their posts all day, then see them out at night, clustered in corners, shy but secure in their status as the new arbiters of everything. People whispered about them the way our parents must have whispered about Warhol’s superstars—with theseething jealousy we save for those who’ve bucked the system. But had they bucked the system, or did they just understand it better? Derrick’s bloggers lived in an impending world, somewhere ahead of the rest of us, posting what we hadn’t yet heard, didn’t yet know. It was a tricky game, with the race to be first tempered by the risk of being wrong. But on the Internet, speed trumped truth, and sensation always won.
    Soon Derrick’s bloggers were being read by tens of thousands each day. They stepped out from their dark corners and began hosting readings, appearing on gossip shows, lunching at Michael’s. They got book deals and started rock labels. They sat down with Charlie Rose. By 2005, blogs were breaking more hard news than the networks and serving up more cultural commentary than the print magazines. They’d become