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"We stand on the verge of being able to change the human race"-Wired magazine, January 1998.
"Hoorah! No more contact with the vile earth! "-F.T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, 1909.
With Silicon Valley going into supernova, eclipsing even Hollywood, New York and Washington, D.C., the media-always acutely aware of where its next ad revenue is coming from-has embraced high tech and Silicon Valley with all the calculating passion of Bill Clinton sizing up a new intern. Fortune did it first and best, when it reportedly informed its advertisers that it intended to have either Bill Gates or Andy Grove in every damn one of its issues in 1997 (God bless editorial integrity!) and then did exactly that, adding legions of tech readers and advertisers.
Everybody else got the message. Forbes devoted several hundred pages of its 80th-anniversary issue to the technology revolution-then blew its credibility by misidentifying David Packard as Bill Hewlett on the cover. Not to be outdone, Business Week not only dedicated a special issue to Silicon Valley, it also gathered every Valley leader it could think of (well, no Jerry Sanders, Wilf Corrigan or T.J. Rodgers-but, hey, ASICs are complicated) and turned them into BW Playmates of the Month with their own foldout cover. Everywhere you look, tech coverage is ascendant. And it's not just business magazines, either. Every local newspaper seems to have a special computing and technology section, and tech coverage is taking over whole sections of Newsweek and Time-the latter even naming Grove Man of the Year about 10 years too late and for the wrong reason ("Intel is the world's largest producer of computer chips," its editor knowingly intoned).
And this is just the beginning. Entire networks, such as Ziff-Davis' ZDTV, are springing up to give us that dawn-to-dusk technology coverage we all crave. As if that weren't enough, there's always the Web, with its infinite supply of press releases, analysis, gossip masquerading as fact and the endless ravings of the increasingly paranoid vox populi.
And now, in the final accreditation, literary carpetbaggers have descended upon the Valley. You know you own the zeitgeist when New York publishers peer across the Hudson, decide there's something going on out here among us Indians, then send Manhattan writers out to...