“Yeah, yeah!” Lord said enthusiastically. “I believe IUMA is my personal implementation of Rave’s calling. I just love working with technology and all those kinds of things, and what Rave culture espoused was that there’s a new revolution going on, an information revolution. You know, one of the biggest stars of Rave music was a band called Dee-Lite. And one of the first lines was, ‘From New York City in the age of communication.’ And that means all kinds of communications, a shrinking world, Internet, it means ideas and the convergence of ideas.” Returning to the subject of his younger days, Rob Lord told me how much he hated the Depeche Mode music that was so popular in upper-middle-class neighborhoods like his—the kind the record stores were selling. He wanted his music from the clubs, from the 100-copy pressing, not from the megaconglomerates offering the likes of Depeche. “The lyrics were terrible, and the emotions were feigned.” I’m sure Depeche fans might disagree. The point, however, was that Depeche music was much more readily available at record stores than Rave was, and Rob grew unhappy with the distribution system. Jeff Patterson, working at a music store, just like Rob Lord, was equally disgusted. Patterson and co-workers “would sit there and talk about who’s making all the money.” CDs cost $15-$17 at Music Plus, his employer. Elsewhere they were around $12-$13. “And you know, we were thinking like, ‘Where is that extra $4 being pocketed?’ You know, after all the costs were taken out, then their manager would get paid, the record company would get paid, people on the tour would get paid, and then the band would finally get some money after all that, and it was usually a very small check. So the artists that were actually continuing to be artists were the artists that were making money; so it was, like, this level of superstardom that was consistent and the barriers of entry were extremely high.” That was true in all kinds of creative endeavors, especially in writing. I myself was amused when lobbyists representing industries such as music and publishing would rant on and on about the need for “creative incentives.” If business people at the megaconglomerates really understood incentives, they would cut out their caviar, sell off the executive jets, and spend more than a modicum on garden-variety artists—not just the Mailers and Madonnas. When, even as a teenager, Jeff Patterson started asking where the money was going, he was laying some of the more important underpinnings for IUMA.