What's left of the sticker is plastered to a newspaper box at the corner of San Francisco's Third and Townsend streets. It has mostly been scraped away, but you can make out the words "KillTheDot." Next to that is a large black dot circled in red, with a slash-through.
The slogan is fading but unmistakable, too: "BlowTheDotOutYourAss.com." This is no promotion for a new dot-com. It's not even a cheeky marketing campaign meant to draw attention to some other dot-com. It is, truly and for real, anti-dot-com. Since Feb. 28, San Franciscans have seen posters and stickers sporting the faked dot-com names around the South of Market area, ground zero for Web startups. "ShredsOfSomeonesSoulForAuction.com." "AnythingIFoundInMyGarageForSale.com." "HairyDrunkenLactatingSpottedMonkies.com."
The stickers showed up on street boxes for news weeklies like SF Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Larger posters are glued to the plywood walls of SOMA's many construction sites, appearing alongside posters for The Cider House Rules, Gameboys, and If These Walls Could Talk, HBO's lesbian love story. One of the more commonly seen posters reads butIDon'tNeedMyToothPasteDelivered.com. Then there's PetShit.com. The people who put them up are planning a second strike soon, since many of the messages have already been scraped away. Where did they all come from? And why?
A handful of San Franciscans, many of them employed by technology companies, decided the time was ripe to send a wakeup call to dot-com land. "It's not like I'm a luddite or against any of this," said the campaign's ad hoc organizer, who requested anonymity. "What I'm against is how it's kind of created this kind of culture of people who ... I mean, like I was saying in my office one day, 'Can anyone sew? Does anyone know how to, like, make a table out of wood?' It's all about this weird dot-com."
<god. i, like, dig it d00d. who wrote that article long ago analyzing this speech: someone said it started with, like, you know, the advent of televsion culture. like it turned us all into a bunch of people who, like, simply experienced everything virtually so it was, like, yeah d00d that's it, it was like reflected in our language, like ya know what i mean?>
The 30-year-old has lived in the city's Mission District for the last six years, and currently works for a technology company he wouldn't name. For purposes of the campaign, he goes by the pseudonym Sam Lowry, taking the name of the main character from the tragic sci-fi satire, Brazil. "Lowry" and some 30 friends and colleagues hit the streets with paper and glue on Feb. 28, timing their strike to coincide with the so-called"second comming" of Y2K on leap day. The medium for their message was a template of pre-designed messages, all ending in the ubiquitous dot-com. The whole dot-com thing has just gotten out of control, Lowry said, and it was time to take some of the edge off of it. The idea was seeded as Lowry and his colleagues were on their way to a dot-com event themselves. "Shiny, 24-year-old people who were all very hip and cool going into this thing. We just couldn't believe that this is what it had come down to -- that this was a cool thing in the Mission -- to go to these kind of dot-com opening parties and stuff. So we came back and threw some eggs at them." And from a little common assault, the inspiration for a more pointed poster campaign was born.
The slogans are even available online at http://blowthedotoutyourass.com, where, with some Avery sticker labels and a laser printer, anyone can be plastering his neighborhood with dot-commentary in a matter of minutes. PenisEnlargementGiftCertificates.com. BeatOffPicturesGalore.com. It's hard to miss the emphasis on sexual and scatological themes, most of which lean heavily toward the obscene. Lowry says the message needs to be shocking, to be heard over the rest of the dot-com din.
"There's so many [dot-com ads] out there that unless it's completely obscene, and gets someone to do a pretty solid double-take, they'll just think that it's another dot-com advertiser." He hopes the campaign will get people to think about what they're doing -- and would-be dot-commers to think twice before believing all the hype.
"People are working ridiculous hours. You hear stories about someone, you know, who made 25 million dollars and doesn't have to work anymore. Everyone's kind of working towards that ideal, or they think they want to. [Meanwhile] no one can get an apartment because they cost way too much, and some 23-year-old already paid cash for it."
Some of the poster slogans target the business models of hit Net companies like home-delivery service kzmo.com-- FreeAnalPasteDeliveredInAnHour.com -- and auction site ebay -- BidOnMyCollectionOfRawFeces.com. The most popular campaign, according to Lowry, had a simple, pointed message to it: FuckYouAndTheStartupYouRodeInOn.com. "That seems to sort of characterize the angst," Lowry said.
Asked to comment on being caught in the satirical crossfire, Kozmo representatives took a look at the website, and decided to decline. EBay acknowledged its amusement, then excused itself from the fray. EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said the company laughed itself "silly-dot-com," when he and others at the company gathered around the campaign's website for a look-see. "We got a chuckle.com out of it," he said. "We appreciate a good laugh."
Pursglove attributes the backlash reaction to dot-com over-promotion -- on radio, TV, billboards, and the sides of buses and taxi cabs. "Clearly there's sort of a suggestion here that there's a revolt against dot-com advertisers -- but eBay doesn't advertise," Pursglove said "And it's interesting that we still have that level of penetration in the public psyche." Lowry said the reaction to the campaign has been overwhelmingly positive, and not just confined to San Francisco. "I get like 50 emails a day from people, all over the world, going 'Thank god you did this,' 'We've been meaning to say this,' 'This is exactly what it's all about,'" Lowry said.
Once confined to the Bay Area, Lowry said he has found takers for the stickers and posters in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and even London. Remote sympathizers can download PDF files to make their own posters. But San Francisco remains the epicenter of the dot-com phenomenon or, if you prefer, cancer. Tim Redmond, executive editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian -- which runs its own "Take Back San Francisco" campaign on billboards and news racks -- says the dot-com images are blitzing the city. "I know this because we were talking about our next promotional campaign. You cannot rent a billboard in San Francisco right now. You can't get bus sides, because there's so much [Web company] advertising."
But most of the grassroots support probably springs from the pressure created by the dot-com economic boom in San Francisco, where rents, as well as advertising rates, are soaring. Meanwhile, not everyone's boat is being lifted by the dot-com tide. "It's dot-com land and there are billboards everywhere and there are millionaires being created every day -- and there are more homeless people than ever in the streets of San Francisco," Redmond said. "There's something very wrong with this picture." Inevitably, some have seen a capital idea in all Lowry's campaign. He said he's received invites to dot-com opening parties, and plenty of people think the whole thing is just another dot-com business in the wind. Some want him to do a t-shirt deal.
"Everyone who sees it who understands all this, they're like, 'Yeah, of course.' And then everyone else is like 'Shoot, why didn't I think of BeatOffPicturesGalore.com?' I heard a story where the person [reacting to one of the posters] couldn't believe that that company got funding. The whole thing just went right over their head." Is his message doing more than making people laugh? What's the end game? "If it could just take a little bit of the edge off of how cool dot-com's are, then I think it would be kind of successful. If someone who was on the edge said, 'You know what? Maybe it's not so cool to go get a job for cleanyourunderwear.com.' I would consider that a marginal success right there."