For 15 years, “cybersatirist” Bob Hirschfeld has been making a living by traveling across the country and doing what he calls “standup with a laptop” to bring humor and insight about technology to various corporate events.
But now, Hirschfeld, 59, is taking his career in a whole new direction — or, you could say, he’s returning to where he started, which was with a ’90s, pre-Onion political satire site called Bob’s Fridge Door.
“For the past two or three years, watching what’s happening in politics, I’ve gotten more and more disgusted by it, and had to get reconnected with politics,” Hirschfeld said.
That doesn’t mean he’s resurrecting Bob’s Fridge (which, in 1996, was named a PC Magazine Top 100 website). Instead, he has created a hybrid between a TED Talk and standup comedy. Hirschfeld wants to start — or at least spark — a discussion about how to get citizens healthily debating issues and making positive changes instead of constantly trying to destroy each other.

Bob Hirschfeld.
Bob Hirschfeld. (Courtesy photo)

The problem was figuring out how to make it relevant and humorous.
He started by re-reading American history. “It made a profound impact on me of how brilliant our founding fathers really were,” he said.
Then the lightbulb went off.
“Suddenly it just came in a rush,” Hirschfeld said. “It was an epiphany.”
The idea? Lay out America’s history and current state in terms of technology and startups.
It’ll sound something like this: The founding fathers are the cofounders of a startup called America, seeking independence from their tyrannical parent company. The first business incubator was in Philly and they created an open-source operating system, but with some limitations, akin to moderating online comments. Now the parties have become bloatware, there’s an ideology virus purging all the original programming and the elite have devised a back-door operating system for their own use, while everyone else gets an “access denied” message.
“We’re back to where we started,” Hirschfeld said. “It’s time to reconnect with founders, time for revolutions, not time to give up on the system and be cynical about it and say there’s nothing we can do. Something’s not working, so how do we recode, clean up code, update and make it functional again?”
For the past six months, Hirschfeld said he’s been working nonstop on the project, where he works out of the coIN Loft, and is dedicating most of his time to memorizing the 45-minute presentation.
He’s hoping the talk, which he says is non-ideological and non-partisan, will get people excited about reenergizing America. And instead of the corporate circuit, he’s expecting he’ll present at a lot of colleges and universities.
Hirschfeld is filming a condensed, 10-minute version of “America: The First Startup” at noon at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington Feb. 24. The video will be used for his marketing launch, and, as he likes a live audience, he’s inviting people to come and listen.
Hirschfeld said he plans on making the talk his new full-time job by sometime in March and is eager to travel anywhere people ask him to present.
“Every indication I get is that it’s going to be a really good idea because people are so fed up with politics,” he said. “I want to go back to what our founders wanted — and they wanted us to passionately argue and debate.”