Fear and Loathing in the Age of Internet Technology

I wish that Hunter S. Thompson had lived long enough to write a book about the dark reality of digital electronics. I can’t help but believe that the author of “Hell’s Angels” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and a bat-winged flock of other bizarre, crazed, depravity-saturated fantasy exposes on contemporary life wouldn’t have richly appreciated the psychosis-inducing torments of, say, server crashes or attempting to sign up for online ad service.

For sure, he would have relished the terrors of tech-based entrepreneurship.  Fear – and coping with fear through sheer, substance-induced, firearm-wielding recklessness – figured big in much of Thompson’s oeuvre. There are few software bugs, file-eating viruses and lousy navigation set-ups he wouldn’t have solved with a handful of peyote buttons and a handgun fired into his own hard drive. So imagine what he would have done with site development, Power Point presentations, blog software, offshore tech support, frozen screens, lost Internet connections and code.

 I like to.  That would be an e-blast, indeed.  

I’m not endorsing his illegal excesses, of course. Just sympathizing with what drove them.

Now, I’ve always explained to my kids that courage doesn’t mean being unafraid – it means doing what must be done even though you are afraid. And being an entrepreneur means being afraid all the time , except when you’re on a momentary manic high because somebody finally returned your phone call or in a deep, leaden, lasting La Brea Tar Pit of a low because you’re alone, broke and trapped in a Doomsday business machine of your own creation.

Ah, creativity. Hunter Thompson was creative. He created his own feral brand of journalism. He also created brilliant trouble and there was no mess so enormous that he couldn’t fuel himself up and drive over it in a hallucinatory frenzy of bravado.

That’s how it feels when you’re the head of every department in your business start-up and you have no experience with half of them and you can’t get it all done properly even putting in 20-hour days and 7-day weeks and you have to walk up to complete strangers and convince them in 10 seconds that your idea is more exciting than sex itself and you’re pretty damn sure they won’t believe you but you have to accelerate off the edge of that psychological abyss over and over in your trashed little 4-cylinder ego made of hope and absurd enthusiasm and all you can do is wave your hat and scream yee-ha! all the way down like Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove.”

And Hunter Thompson didn’t write “Dr. Strangelove,” but I bet he wished he had.

He died Feb. 20, 2005. Three years and one week ago, Thompson’s ashy remains were scattered all over his Woody Creek, Colo. homestead by a cannon, to the accompaniment of sparkly fireworks and a whole lot of drinking.  He was an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, making strangely stylish opportunity out of disaster his whole life long. And he did it all, I feel safe saying, without once having to decipher site traffic reports. Lucky man.