COLUMN ONE : For GenX, the <i> Angst</i> Is On-Line : Born in the baby boomers’ shadow, they call themselves Generation X. An electronic bulletin board is a forum for their gripes about a world they never made.

Their names are Oblivious Child, Agnostic w/o a Cause, Will Work for Pay, and Spent the 60s on a Slip and Slide.

Their favorite topics include “Home Sweet Shoebox,” “The Revolting Yuppie Excess I Witnessed Today” and that perennial favorite, “Wage Slave, Slacker, or What?”

For nearly a year now, they’ve been ragging on baby boomers and commiserating over their own putative impoverishment. They come from all over the country. Most of them have never met.

Welcome to the Generation X forum on the Well, an electronic bulletin board founded by aging hippies and now home to a rotating brigade of twentysomethings who use it to rage at, marvel over and ridicule the “media virus” that has suddenly sprung up around them.

After decades of obsessing over the ubiquitous baby boomers, America has discovered the generation that grew up in their shadow. But the baby busters, as they have been called, are already sick of their newfound fame.

They’ve been touted on magazine covers as an untapped market and pictured on TV as embittered slackers, at once alienated from and deprived of the American Dream.

Boomers are not, of course, the first to worry, “What’s the matter with kids today?” And lately, the urge to account for the odd fashions and precarious finances of their offspring has been on the rise. Business Week, NBC, U.S. News and World Report, the New Republic, Advertising Age, the Atlantic and the Economist all have weighed in on such questions over the last few months.

“I hate this press crap,” said a posting by Clay Graham, 25, who goes by the pseudonym “cyber23” on the conference. “I wish they would just decide genX is dead.”

But to marketers, Generation X is anything but dead. The 46 million young adults born between 1964 and 1975 make up an estimated $125-billion annual market, whether they like it or not. Not surprisingly, many insist that the feverish effort to analyze them, pigeonhole them and convert them into better consumers falls considerably wide of the mark.

“I don’t buy things,” said Scott Lamorte, 24. “Especially if they’re advertised.”

Lamorte is a regular on the GenX board, which takes its name from the title of Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book on the new generation. Among the most popular of the Well’s 200 discussion groups, the board offers an unguarded look at how these children of television, divorce and downward mobility see themselves, their prospects and the boomers who keep trying to sum them up.

The chorus of Xers whose voices bounce around the Well isn’t a perfect proxy for the entire generation, but it is in many ways typical. The GenX conferees are underpaid, cynical and computer literate, and unlike many other computer forums, this one has about as many women as men.

Both sexes are fond of complaining.

“No one is listening to me,” Cynsa Bonorris, 27, wrote a couple of weeks after two of her classes at San Francisco State were canceled by budget cuts. “Instead, they listen to the boomers, who are more numerous, and what do the boomers say? In the ‘60s they said ‘no more war.’ In the ‘60s the boomers had idealism and high hopes. But NOW, now when I really need them to speak out because no one will listen to me, now they say: ‘I have a HOUSE. For god’s sake, don’t raise property taxes. Prop. 13 was a GREAT idea. yeah!’ ”

Since you-know-who tend to control the media, boomer-bashing and the misunderstood youth routine have tended to backfire on the Xers, provoking headlines like the one in a recent San Jose weekly: “Whinin’ Bout My Generation.” On the GenX board, the occasional over-35 browsers have been known to offer the electronic equivalent of a pat on the head and variations of the hated “you’ll grow out of it” dictum.

But although many of the Xers’ gripes about their elders sound like echoes of generations gone by, there are a few that seem born solely of years spent in the boomers’ wake.

One complaint is the wake’s size. The 69 million baby boomers are the largest generation of Americans ever born in the span of 19 years, making it harder for Xers to compete.

Jefferey McManus, 27, a San Franciscan who helped start the GenX board last summer said: “They’re everywhere. Even if some of them eventually die off, there’ll still be enough of them clinging to the edge to keep us out.”

Self-righteousness is another characteristic. Inheriting the biggest public debt in history would be bad enough, but when the people who racked it up are the same ones who proclaimed that “all you need is love,” Xers say their much-remarked cynicism is understandable.

It was when Bonorris was being ignored on the Well’s “Beatles” board last August that the idea for the GenX conference came to her. After conferring with McManus, who had just finished the Coupland book and ditched his latest low-paying “McJob,” they decided to host a conference for GenXers.

Although computer bulletin boards are one of the few areas where twentysomethings tend to dominate the less technically literate boomers, the Well is an ironic forum for GenXers. Known for its large contingent of Deadheads, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, to use its full name, is disproportionately stocked with the ‘60s rejects that so grate on Xers’ nerves.

To the Xers, the vast Well space devoted to ancient history such as Watergate and bands that broke up when Jimmy Carter was President is symptomatic of the cultural monopoly exercised by boomers for as long as they can remember. “I never listened to the Beatles of my own volition when I was a kid--I just heard them all the time because they were so overplayed,” Bonorris said. “I wanted a place to go where I could say things and have people understand where I was coming from.”

It worked. The Well’s Xer populace quickly found its way to the new forum, eager to commiserate over their bleak employment prospects and indulge in their own form of nostalgia. Who says the Xers have no common culture? As cyber23 puts it: “Where else can you go and talk about who’s better, Wilma or Betty?”

That’s right, from “The Flintstones.” Some of this is as shallow as it sounds, but it also reflects the Xers’ chronic skepticism toward older people, history and themselves. Who cares where you were when Kennedy was shot? The critical question on the GenX board--one that has elicited over 200 responses since it was posed last August--is “where were you when you first heard ‘Rock Lobster’?” (The 1979 song by the B-52s was a striking departure from the classic rock that ruled the airways).

Xers may be poor, but the Well isn’t free. Like everyone else on the system, they have personal computers, modems and the wherewithal to pay $15 a month plus $2 an hour. But even those who possess the high-tech basics of the 1990s are often employed in the part-time, no-benefits pattern that has plagued the decade’s college grads.

Fawn Fitter, who graduated from Boston University in 1988, was a regular on the GenX board until she announced several weeks ago that her free-lance writing income could no longer support the habit. Laid off by a small New England paper last year, Fitter says she enjoys being self-employed--but it’s hard to make ends meet, as she noted on the conference in September:

“Dammit, I’m 25 years old *today* today and I’m *regressing* from living by myself for three years to being forced by financial considerations to acquire roommates to--hell, who knows? Living with Mom? Yikes!”

RuthAnne Bevier, 28, has a full-time job at the Huntington Library in San Marino that helps pay her bills. But she’s a trained law librarian and half of what she does is clerical work. Bevier seeks solace on the GenX board nearly every morning before work, and more often than not at lunch as well.

Solace is not hard to find. The litany under the heading “McJobs I Have Held” reflects the hurdles faced by a generation coming of age when American companies seem to be hiring fewer full-time workers and paying them less. By contrast, the topic “Dream Jobs I Have Held” is conspicuously empty.

“The doors were shut at the end of the 1980s,” said 26-year-old Andrew Hultkrans, who works for “slave wages” as an editor at the techno-culture magazine Mondo 2000 when he’s not logged onto the GenX board. “When I was a freshman in college all I heard about were people being recruited in droves to Wall Street. When I graduated, all the jobs available were for free internships.”

Alan Chamberlain, one of the boomers who gamely defends his generation on the Xers’ own turf, scoffs at such complaints.

“Look, in my 20 I didn’t have ---- either,” the 40-year-old Chamberlain said, recounting his evolution from a musician living in a trailer to his current life as a well-paid computer engineer. “I think when you guys get a little older and your priorities change, so will your resentment toward the previous generation . . . at which point I believe you’ll understand why it is worth $50K to drive a very well-made, high-performance automobile.”

Other elders dropping in on the Xers sound less secure. “I think this is my first experience of being a contemptible old person,” said David Gans, host of the Well’s Grateful Dead conference.

“Acknowledging the problem is the first step, David,” came the response.

Recently, under the headings “Clueless Old People Ask Questions of Youth” and vice versa, there has been something of a rapprochement between the Well’s Xers and the boomers who deign to speak to them, although not all has gone smoothly. “OK. Like a name like Megadeth. Is that supposed to be like Mega-death and they can’t spell? Or in any case what does it mean?” one old person wanted to know.

A young person wondered if someone would “please tell me what happened at Altamont.” Queried another: “what is this thing ‘escrow,’ and does it bite?”

It’s not that boomers are devoid of useful information, the Xers concede. What they really bridle at is the BTDT (been-there-done-that) syndrome--and the assumption that, in the end, they’ll come around to seeing things the way their elders do. Many on the GenX board say they’ve seen what the American Dream did for their parents and remain unimpressed. Contrary to the media virus, they insist that they are not so eager to follow in the footsteps of the baby boomers, even if they could.

Lamorte, for example, went through a string of McJobs that included janitorial duties at San Jose Hospital, order-taking at Taco Bell and Jack-in-the-Box, and loading tractor-trailer rigs at a Toys-R-Us warehouse before finally landing a $30,000-a-year income as a computer consultant. Then, last December, he quit.

“I’m what’s called house-surfing,” Lamorte said. “I got sick of working eight hours a day for obnoxious yuppies just to earn money. I’m learning how to live really cheaply.” (Among the material possessions Lamorte has retained are his laptop computer and modem, which he uses to log onto the GenX conference whenever he’s staying somewhere with a phone).

It’s the self-consciously minimalist lifestyle of the Lamorte brand of Xers, combined with the involuntary poverty of the rest, that has Madison Avenue biting its nails.

After tenderly ministering to every whim of the boomers’ evolving buying frenzy--usually to the exclusion of everyone else--the marketing types are beginning to realize that their next target may not be such an easy sell. How do you appeal to a generation that sees the boomers’ conspicuous consumption as one of the main roots of its own plight?

A recent article in Advertising Age cites the sage advice of marketing experts: Cut the come-on with sarcasm and pretend somehow that the advertiser doesn’t take its product too seriously. Kind of like the Xers themselves.

This approach, which marks some recent ads for McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Revlon and Subaru, hasn’t gone over on the GenX conference.

“Anyone see the ‘Gen-X’ Subaru commercial? You know, the one with the ‘grunge’ clothes spewing some BS about how Subarus are like punk rock?” went the message posted on the board a few weeks after the car company released its attempt at the new genre last month. “Does anyone else wanna kill this guy?”

Several affirmative responses followed.