Fondling My Stock Options.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara

In San Francisco, there's a billboard for an e-trading firm that reads, "Make love not war," and then--down at the bottom--"Screw it, just make money." Drive down Highway 10! to the San Francisco airport and you come to another instructive dot.com billboard, this one saying: "Root of all evil.... Can't buy happiness," with the punch line, at the bottom of the sign, "Blah, blah, blah."

Now I am not the kind of person whose pulse rises and falls with the NASDAQ. Until embarrassingly recently, I had never heard "dot.com" used as a noun. I thought an IPO was an International Peace Organization and a "browser" was someone you might try to pick up in a bookstore.

You could attribute my ignorance to denial, and trace that in turn to envy. For five months of this year, I lived in a suburb of Silicon Valley called Berkeley, where rents have gotten so high that the university is issuing sleeping bags and pup tents to incoming students--forget about four walls and a roof. And why are the rents so high? Because just a few miles south lies Silicon Valley, where the poverty level is now more than $50,000 a year--thanks to the cost of housing. New millionaires are being minted--or were, as of a couple of months ago--at the rate of sixty a day. My fellow professors at the university used to choke on their lattes as they shared stories of colleagues who had bolted for dot.coms and were now using $50 bills to insulate their ski lodges in Aspen.

Finally I got my own chance to join in the e-frenzy. A few weeks into my Berkeley sojourn, a fellow called to invite me to participate in his start-up--a web site that would publish brief instantaneous news commentaries by approximately 100 "famous people" like myself. The "famous people" part had the desired effect, reducing me instantly to a mood of craven compliance, and the pay had me practically groveling. We commentators would be paid not in money--which is, when you think about it, so 1999--but in the more up-to-date form of stock options. Though I am not too sure what a stock option is and how it differs exactly from a stockyard or stockpile, I knew I had to have some.

But it was the means of determining each commentator's rate of pay that excited me: We web site contributors would be paid on the basis of the number of "hits" our commentaries attracted, which in e-biz corresponds to the number of people who bother to look at them.

As it happens, I know something about the technology of attracting hits. As...