When alarm:clock first met with the organizers of KillTheDot.com in December, we could hardly have imagined the sort of global impact this underground group of disgruntled dot-com workers would eventually have. The co-founders, who share the pseudonym Sam Lowry (a reference to a character in the movie Brazil), spoke of their general disgust with the surge of dot-com hype–which, at the time, was peaking–and revealed early drafts of the stickers and banners they planned to spread throughout San Francisco’s SOMA district, home to many dot-com companies. "The resistance is beginning to mobilize," one of the Sam Lowrys told us in December, "It is small but passionate." It was so small, in fact, that nobody knew about it.

On the night of February 28, loosely-affiliated members of BlowTheDotOutYourAss.com (the organization officially changed its name), held a secret meeting at the Eagle’s Nest, a bar in the heart of the SOMA district, at which alarm:clock was present. This was the first gathering of the organization and its purpose was to prepare a decisive assault on the surrounding area. Buckets of wheat paste were made available, as were stickers and posters bearing indelicate urls like FuckYouAndTheStartUpYouRodeInOn.com. Various members of the group took responsibility for different buildings (many of which housed the offices of their dot-com employers) throughout the SOMA district and then headed off into the night, armed with anti-Internet propaganda and a conviction that the dot-com hype must be curtailed.

The canvassing was a success and by the next day curious pedestrians and journalists descended on the organization’s website. Over the next several weeks, news outlets ranging from Salon.com and Wired News to USA Today and geek super-site Slashdot.org ran stories about the anti-Web group and its site. At Slashdot.org, some readers praised the spirit of the movement while others questioned the authenticity of the idea. "The whole thing strikes me as hollow geek chic," one reader opined.

Either way, news of the movement struck a chord. At the height of the frenzy, Lowry was receiving hundreds of emails an hour and numerous inquiries about advertising opportunities. From Japan to Italy, people were coming to the site to download their own copies of BlowTheDot’s free propaganda. Students from Penn State University went so far as to scale a local water tower to post the stickers and claim to have "plastered the whole campus," reports Lowry.

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