Led by Michael Ray, a Stanford University (dossier) business guru pacing the open-air stage, the audience vents its fear and anger, not at the boss or the government or the television, but at their sense of insecurity in a strange new world.

Capitalize "mySelf," Ray says, "as we capitalize God." The nattering voice of judgment will sap your natural genius and hold you back, he adds, so "get mad at it!"

And the audience does. Together, the assembled workers of the new economy shout that voice down with a righteous song of themSelves.

The defiant chorus is the climax of Ray's keynote address on "Creativity in Business," one of the central themes of Fast Company's latest RealTime event. The twice-yearly gathering of souls (the next will be held in Phoenix this fall) is a physical manifestation of the popular business magazine's new age/new-economy zeitgeist - part tent revival, part wonk-fest, with an intense focus on the ideas found between the covers of its perfect-bound pages. It's no accident that Ray is featured in the current issue as "the most creative man in Silicon Valley." Like most of the other speakers at this sold-out event, hosted at the Disney Institute in Orlando, Ray is part of a tight loop of "prophets of the new economy" - as Fast Company's Web site calls them - whose teachings are at the heart of the magazine's hypercharged version of enlightened capitalism.

It's also no accident that many of the magazine's readers - and staff - think of the hugely successful multimedia enterprise not as an advertising vehicle or news source, but as a movement. Fast Company comes complete with a core philosophy, a call to arms and comrades aplenty from around the world. Alan Webber, the 51-year-old founding editor of the magazine, explains why as the amphitheater is clearing out: "It's a gathering of the clan. People know each other; they just haven't been introduced yet."

Thinkers like Ray have the new-age-meets-new-economy blend down pat. Echoing the all-inclusive human potential movement of the '60s, Ray in one speech cites Heracleitus, St. Paul, Sigmund Freud and Walt Disney to drive home his point on the "regenerative leadership" potential of a genius trapped in the body of a middle manager. It's just a twist of fate, he tells his audience, that he's up on stage instead of them: "There's a hero's story in all of you!"

Over a vegetarian lunch, Ray elaborates: "The more you find out about yourself, the more you can make connections with other people." The key institutions for growing yourself and sharing the wealth, he believes, are businesses. Ray, who has been teaching a seminar on the issue at Stanford for the past 20 years, calls it "individual enlightenment within organizational transformation."

This is where RealTime comes in. If work in the new economy is personal, then a need is created for a new-economy self-help group.

COMPANY OF FRIENDS
It is a brilliant formula and has been the basis of Fast Company's success since its 1995 debut: Create insecurity by blurring the line between market-driven work goals and spiritually driven personal goals, and then relieve that insecurity with a carefully constructed synthesis of the two. "The hot magazine defines a world and then convinces you that it's your duty to be part of it," media critic Michael Wolff wrote recently in New York magazine, "most often by suggesting that you are the only one who isn't already part of it."

Wolff compares the magazine's all-inclusive worldview to Playboy's equally detailed evocation of the swinger lifestyle, replete with clubs and parties - a fully realized world the reader can join for the price of a magazine or an overnight trip.

Indeed, Fast Company doesn't have readers but a "community." Its local discussion clubs go by "Company of Friends" and are referred to as "cells" that follow "calls to action." (In keeping with the revolutionary allusion, RealTime fellow travelers call themselves, with only slight irony, "workplace co-conspirators.") Today there are 130 cells worldwide with well over 25,000 members, says Heath Row, an associate editor at Fast Company who came up with the idea in 1997. In New York, the local cell has 1,000 members and is already running into trouble dealing with breakneck growth.