"Change is Good" Book Excerpt: WIRED Cofounder Louis Rossetto's New Novel Parties Like It's 1998

From his perch as editor in chief, he watched as the nascent internet took off, fulfilling his prediction that the world was about to be swept by a digital "Bengali typhoon." Among other things, that epochal storm spawned a dotcom wave that was cresting in 1998. Now, two decades later, Rossetto has written a novel that captures the optimism, greed, fervor, and madness of that era. Set in a fictional San Francisco, Change Is Good: A Story of the Heroic Era of the Internet, follows the intertwined adventures of a startup CEO, a WIRED reporter, a code-writing true believer, and many more instantly iconic characters ripped from the mists of the first dotcom boom. What follows is a chapter from Rossetto's novel, which takes place during a wild party thrown by the fictional WIRED magazine. Carl Hess stands in the line flowing into a looming warehouse off Third Street in the Mission Bay wasteland that was once the old Union Pacific yards.