[...] They're all business development VPs for one Web site or another or marketing directors or PR flakes or CEOs -- and they all have graduate degrees and come from good schools and used to work in management consulting. They're not all blond and blue-eyed but that's the dominant strain. They all have firm handshakes and can look you in the eye and have big plans to go away on the weekend and aren't absent-minded and know to come out with a laugh when the conversational gambit is mean to provoke one. It's like the Valley crowed was given an en masse Cosmo makeover, given "that MBA look," gentrified just in time for the big Silicon Valley dramatizations and book deals. I looked at the scene, and I thought about how NBC bought into the company, and then it hit me: the party looked like a scene from Friends. As if every actor who hadn't made the cut had been given a job in the Internet division.

This is the cultural scene of late 1998. Programming used to be the bread and butter of high tech, but the in crowd now prefers chapati to bread and creme fraiche to butter. It's all about synergy deals and branding and national advertising.