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This article examines the interaction of technical, social, institutional and philosophical developments that predated Napster, and how Napster came to signify these qualities (however briefly) for a generation of users. Napster arrived at the confluence of social currents including a decade of institutional spending on networks, intensified focus on teens and young adults as a market, and the rapid commercialization of the Internet in the ‘dot com’ boom. Napster’s importance, it is argued, was as a techno-cultural pheomenon, a totem of a belief system that included both commercial and communal components. This paper traces the historical roots of Napster and related technologies, but also focuses on the role of American universities in promoting first Internet adoption, then broadband networks as both research and marketing strategies. It also compares the rhetoric of the Internet in the 2000 US presidential elections and the marketing of ‘cool’ surrounding Internet adoption at the end of the 1990s. It pinpoints the nexus of commercial, educational and political forces that branded the Internet as both a vital economic engine and an emblem of youthful vitality and resistance. With its irresitable lure of free music, Napster introduced millions to peer networks, open source idealism, and the concept of gift economics, and popularized emerging shifts in producer-consumer relationships. These ideas came to embody the Internet (and especially the World Wide Web) for many users, altering the social and economic positions of global media congomerates and provoking new models of media creation and distribution. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]