D.C. Dotcom

You can see all the way from the past to the future of Washington from atop the Tower Club, a posh, crusted-sea-bass kind of eatery crowning an office building in Tysons Corner, Va. Barely visible in the distance is the 555-ft.-high Washington Monument, looking like a gray toothpick far out on the horizon. But right down below, amid miles of suburban shopping malls and carpet outlets and car dealerships, is a place that's becoming as important as the formal capital of the U.S., a place that's doing something traditional Washington has never done before: generating billions in private wealth.

Just 15 miles across the Potomac River from the marble and granite monuments built during 224 years of democracy, the acronyms of Washington have been newly scrambled. You won't find the FTC, the FBI or the DOD; but you can't miss the shiny new glass-and-stone headquarters of UUNet and PSINet, AMS and UUcom, commercial titans of the new Washington. You can't miss the new-economy entrepreneurs in their Lexuses and Land Rovers doing deals on cell phones as they zip around I-66 and Routes 7, 50 and 123. And you certainly can't avoid the traffic. Fifteen years ago, Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington counties in northern Virginia were nothing but sleepy residential communities and remote farmland, places to drive through on the way to Dulles Airport or concerts at Wolf Trap or camp sites near Front Royal. Now this 1,400-sq.-mi. area of northern Virginia is threatened with becoming a concrete-and-asphalt expanse of office buildings and parking lots, home to hundreds of new dotcoms, telephone companies, wireless firms, Internet-service providers and venture capitalists--home to everything that makes the new economy the powerhouse that it is.

"Washington isn't just a government town anymore," observes Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who recently ventured all the way out to speak to a gathering of new CEOs at the Tower Club. "The synergy of telecommunications and the Internet has created a boom." And this is a boom with cultural as well as economic consequences. The thousands of companies that dapple suburban Maryland and Virginia don't face the Pentagon or the Treasury anymore: they face Fairfax County, Va., where the real money is. "The best thing governments can do is stay out of the way," says a prominent northern Virginia venture capitalist, voicing a common if ironic sentiment in the heart of the region that created the Internet. But official Washington isn't about to disappear. Administration officials, Senators and members of Congress--and, more important, the fund-raising arms of their political parties--are making it a point to know who's who in the local tech world. "We have no problem getting our phone calls returned," says John Backus, chairman of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), a business-promotion group.

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