I started using this web address back in 1997. The tech bubble was just bubbling up and I didn’t see any place in it for me. It was all faux hipness and “thinking outside of the box” (has it changed?) – in other words, it was for people who acknowledged a box and then stretched their nimble little monkey minds in search of new clichés about the exciting always-on boundaryless world in which we could all work on something cool 24/7. It seemed boring and smug, so I decided to start a webzine with no rules. It would be fuck-all tabloid ludicrousness and it would violate a few laws. My young pal Josh Ellis agreed to help me put the site together and Channing Hansen (brother to Beck) agreed to design a special “Web Of Paranoia” – creating a patterned series of links to conspiracy sites, national security sites, freemasonry type deals. and some weirdass piece of free Microsoft software that – at that time – was screwing up people’s computers.

As luck would have it, Charles Manson came up for parole as I was working up the first issue (there would only be two) and told the parole board that he couldn’t be bothered with getting released at that moment because he was “too busy working on my website.” Perfect hipster tabloid fodder!

My intuition was that Disinformation founder Richard Metzger would be really interested in interviewing Manson’s webmaster (that’s what they were called in those days) and I was right. So I looked up Chuckie’s website, grabbed the contact email address and passed it all on to Metzger. Mansonoid webmaster “St. George” agreed to the interview. (The link on my original site is busted but you can check it here.) It took St. George awhile to respond to Metzger’s questions, slowing down the opening of the site. My favorite moment in the process was getting an email from Metzger with the Subject: “It’s coming down… slow.” When Metzger asked St. George what Charlie thought about certain things, George went and asked him. Very soon after the interview was published, Manson was banned for a long time from speaking to the press.

Revolting! went up with a picture of Manson sticking out his tongue on the homepage. Other pieces included one by Boing Boinger Mark Frauenfelder telling the story of how he and his friends captured an alien and subjected him to an anal probe. We had a “Shockwave Audio” file of Trent Reznor detailing his favorite shit story for my former Mondo Vanilli bandmate Simone (she was collecting excremental tales at the time). It involved – if I remember correctly – someone throwing fireworks in an unflushable toilet filled with a few days worth. Hilarity no doubt ensued.

We grabbed a bunch of corporate banner ads from other sites, including AOL (can’t really remember the others. I think we might have used Warner Brothers) and we put them in rotation as banner ads on our own site. Soon the cease-and-desist demands arrived telling us to remove the free advertising from the site. As soon as I got them, I complied and faxed them back a message, letting them know that the ad had been removed and thanking them for their momentary contribution to Revolting!

After one more issue, I tired of doing the webzine Revolting! without funding. Although I had entertained the notion that the “Long Boom” had room for some authentic memetic bomb throwing — that some newly minted mega-millionaire hipster type would get, and fund, the joke –alas, it was not to be,

But all was not lost. In 1999, Jeff Diehl – who was unknown to me at the time — was hired by the interactive porn company WebPower to create a hip tabloid webzine. I went in for the interview, I showed him Revolting! and I was hired on the spot to be Editor-In-Chief.

GettingIt.com was a year of heaven. We got to pay freelancers a dollar a word. We had regular weekly columns from Lydia Lunch, Andrei Codrescu and Robert Anton Wilson. One writer who contributed a good number of articles was Peter Braunstein. Braunstein was always easy to deal with; his ideas were solid; his work was always on time and required almost no editing, A few years later he was famous all over NYC when he went on the lam after torturing a woman he had been stalking while dressed as a fireman.

Errr… not to end my first entry into the new Revolting on a disquieting note but…