(FORTUNE Magazine) – When a journalist takes off for a computer industry conference, she expects to trade business cards and rack up contacts. She expects to hear gossip about deals, about why Microsoft isn't a presence there ("they don't need anyone else") and why "Apple doesn't matter." She does not expect to hear about metaphors, Darwin, or tending gardens. But PC Forum is not your typical confab. It's a 20-year-old annual to-do where cyber poo-bahs gather to ponder big ideas: Truth, Liberty, Community, Metaphor. This year the participants--including such nontechies as Michael Crichton and Citicorp Chairman John Reed--tackled nothing less than figuring out, as a trade journalist put it, "who we want to be when we grow up."

Why hop on the couch now? Simple--techies are having a midlife crisis. Many of the big shots at PC Forum are picture-perfect, Birkenstocked billionaires and centimillionaires--libertarians who boast "I inhaled!" from behind their Wall Street Journal. Their faces grace the covers of major magazines. Everybody's climbing onto the Web--their Web. But trouble looms in paradise. Since January 1, the Interactive Week index of Internet stocks is off 18%. The IPO boom is over. Making profits on the Web is tough. So which way is up? Are techies insiders or outsiders? Some 500 people paid $3,300 each to bask in Tucson's desert sun and figure it all out.

Identity-crafting can be slippery stuff. The first morning of PC Forum, we sat in the main auditorium and contemplated the notion of metaphor. The goal was to decode exactly what the Web is, or at least what it resembles, in hopes of steering it toward maturity. Scholar George Lakoff, author of Metaphors We Live By, proclaimed that the people in the room were making metaphors come true.

Which ones? Lakoff offered a few scary examples: The Web page is its author's external self; the Web makes the core self into an information manager. Online marketer Kyle Shannon complained that the words associated with the Web denote limits. Sites. Pages. People are users, not participants. Shannon argued for new labels that would communicate possibility. Designer Roger Black agreed. "We have to keep an innocent mind about the Web," he said. "We've let it congeal around the edges too much. It needs to be fluid. The Web is about sex, about people getting to know each other."

"Yeah," said Lakoff. "Where's the sensuality in a FAQ?" (A FAQ, for those of you not yet grappling with these complex issues, is a list of answers to "Frequently Asked Questions." FAQs were invented to reduce the amount of time tech-support people have to spend dealing with your piddling user problems. In other words, a FAQ is a way for people to avoid each other. Its romantic equivalent: a candy conversation heart, in its bag, on the grocery-store shelf.)

But maybe Black's right--maybe the Web is about fostering community, enabling communication, sharing, collaboration. Participants spent two more sessions hashing this out, with limited success. "What does this mean, exactly?" someone asked me at lunch. Another participant complained: "We've tried to set up 'communities' at our Website, and they look like, talk like, and walk like black holes."

The harbinger of doom, novelist and screenwriter Michael Crichton, breezed in to deliver a speech over dinner on the first day of the conference. "I'm very suspicious of connection technologies," Crichton told me before he spoke, "so I'm fascinated with people who aren't." Accompanied by his own multimedia presentation--complete with clips from Microsoft commercials and scenes from Star Trek--Crichton argued that the multimedia virtual world was destroying children's ability to perceive reality and short-cutting quality instruction. His voice rose to a crescendo. "We're the Borg!" he cried, pointing to half-machine Star Trek villains projected on the presentation screen. "We're zombie-like people. This is what a child sees when he looks at adults preoccupied with cell phones and Internet connections." After his speech, a group swarmed about for autographs.

They were clearly enthusiastic--what better to get the mental gears turning than a little intellectual discussion? "I'm refreshed!" one initially skeptical engineer told me as we left. Vernor Vinge, a professor, science-fiction writer, and self-described optimist, told me that he thought dreams and deals are one and the same. He envisions a future where technology renders us immortal, where a person's biggest problem will be boredom, a crisis of the soul. "What new life experiences are there to have when you're one million years old?" he asked.

The industry may have to wait a million years for metaphorical clarity. On the last day of PC Forum, organizer Esther Dyson told us "in summary" that the industry needs to mix metaphors. "We say that the Web is evolving, like a life form. But the difference between this world and the natural world is our self-awareness. The natural metaphors can only go so far. We need to decide where we're going, to be gardeners and not just people lost in the jungle." Lakoff piped in that this was indeed a situation that called for "metaphor blends."

Hmmmm. Where does that leave the poo-bahs? Slinking into corners to talk about what really moves the earth--deals. "This scene is 90% about schmooze and 10% about everything else," one longtime attendee told me at a patio cocktail party. His face was framed by the Hale-Bopp comet and a perfect lunar eclipse.