I certainly was caught up in it, but I think you still are: "Dot-Com Is Dot-Gone, and the Dream With It
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
MARK LEIBOVICH recalled the day in 1999 when he showed up
early for an appointment at a Washington dot-com. Mr. Leibovich, a
reporter for The Washington Post, was there to interview the company's
executives. "I got there just in time to see the C.E.O. himself wheeling a
foosball table into the lobby" to give the impression that the high-tech firm
possessed the desired quantum of wackiness that its Silicon Valley
counterparts are famous for.
That is so over, and so much more over, even, than before. The popular
obsession with the dot-com revolution, fading for more than a year, seems to
have simply winked out since mid-September, as firemen and warriors have
become the new heroes, and e-commerce's whiz kids are consigned to the
cultural boneyard.
Not much more than a year ago, boosters of the New Economy and their
true believers in the press were claiming to have changed all the rules. Not
just in tech-fetish magazines like Wired, but in self- styled cultural arbiters
like New York magazine, which declared the 1990's the "e-Decade." In a
1999 cover story, the essayist Michael Wolff — himself a failed dot-com
executive — announced a brave new world. "There is, at the elusive center
of the e- experience, the fantasy that we might become free of economic
laws," he wrote. "All it takes to make otherworldly riches is the will and
desire." It wasn't enough to make money. They had to make history.
Now they themselves are history. Each day, the old idols seem to fade
further into the dim past, barely recollected in a country where the languages
of "revolution" and "warfare" are no longer just business metaphors. This is
the next step after the bursting of the dot-com economic bubble — the
bursting of the cultural bubble, the end of the nerd as a crossover hit, of the
I.P.O. zillionaire as role model to college students.
The changing of the guard can be seen in little things. Like Henry Blodget,
the industry analyst who became famous for predicting early that
Amazon.com would reach $400 a share, announcing that he is taking a
buyout and leaving Merrill Lynch at the grand old age of 35.
Like the growing wave of books that focus not on the dot-com path to riches
but on the wild plunge into the abyss. Having failed to sell their dreams, they
are now attempting to sell their failure. A documentary of the rise and fall of a
Silicon Alley company was chronicled in "Startup.Com" by Sebastian
Nokes, released last winter. Books by former dot-com executives are
arriving in stores. Two of the first are "A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's
Story of Business Excess, Success, and Reckoning" by Stephan Paternot,
founder of Theglobe.com, and "Dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an
Internet Goliath," by J. David Kuo. Another is coming soon: "Boo Hoo," the
chronicle of the spectacular failure of Boo.com, the luxury fashion site that
burned through $185 million of its investors' cash and had an online life of
just six months, told by its profligate founders.
Did we mention that Mr. Blodget is writing a book?
For the most part, however, the flood of dot-com failure stories is being met
with a national yawn. The tell-all books have bounced around the
Amazon.com rankings without making inroads into best-seller territory. And
why not? Because former idols have feet of clay. In "A Very Public
Offering," a book written as amateurishly as the company was run, did we
need the image of Mr. Paternot dancing the night away in plastic pants?
Ellen DeGeneres's new sitcom, "The Ellen Show," is built around the notion
of an executive returning to her hometown after the collapse of her dot-com,
but the show sits at the miserable ranking of 93rd for the season — behind
"Emeril," the celebrity chef comedy — despite Ms. DeGeneres's own
considerable appeal.
To Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, the
country is experiencing an abrupt cultural shift away from the libertarian,
individualistic values that were expressed in the celebration of the New
Economy and toward more old- fashioned values in the wake of the terrorist
attacks, when government is not The Problem and people are not The
Market. "There's been a sea change," he said. The surge in charitable giving
and blood donations after Sept. 11, he said, underscores "the sense that
you're willing to give priority to the common good, to public safety and
public health."
Paulina Borsook, the author of "Cyberselfish," a critical look at dot- com
values published last year, said: "People really crave a reminder of human
bonds that have to do with sacrifice and fellowship and getting to know each
other over time. It's not about changing jobs every six months and getting
stock options."
In the 90's, college students hoping to emulate Marc Andreessen of
Netscape and other geek stars migrated to Silicon Valley or New York's
Silicon Alley with thin résumés and visions of Testarossas dancing in their
heads. That's all changing, said Thomas T. Field, director of the Center for
the Humanities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "Many of
the young adults that I see coming to campus now say they want fulfilling
jobs, not just ways of earning money," he said. "Sounds awfully familiar,
when you come from the 60's generation."
Professor Field suggested that protests over globalism, and the sense of
security that flourished during the boom, made young people more willing to
question the status quo and to take chances. During the I.P.O. frenzy, he
said, students could not wait to get out of school and begin earning. This
year, many of his students have chosen to study abroad in China, Nepal,
India and Egypt.
The country is in dot-com denial, Ms. Borsook said, adding, "No one wants
to admit that they were caught up in it," an attitude she calls "I don't want to
think that I drank the Kool-Aid."
Good riddance, said Thomas Frank, the author of "One Market Under God:
Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic
Democracy."The book is a withering attack on the ideas underlying the
selling of the New Economy, which he says co-opted hipness and the
language of populism to serve greed and gain. The book has come out in
paperback with a new afterword. "It's going to take some time for it to sink
in," Mr. Frank said. "The Dow isn't going to go to 36,000, and the dot-coms
aren't going to come back — and a lot of people lost a lot of money."
Though dot-com executives might seem irrelevant these days, the
technologies they sold, by and large, are not, pointed out Paul Saffo, an
analyst at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "People haven't
stopped using the Internet," he said. "The fact is that it is changing the world,
and it has changed the world." People now expect to be able to buy a book
or make an airline reservation in the middle of the night, "and it's washed into
the rest of their lives."
Kevin Kelly, who as a longtime editor of Wired magazine helped create the
heroic ethos surrounding dot- com entrepreneurs, acknowledged "it came
tumbling down with the towers." But Mr. Kelly insisted that these people
would rise again. The generation of tyro executives who crashed and burned
"got better business education than they could if they had gotten a Harvard
M.B.A.," he said. "They didn't set out to learn, but, boy, they are much
smarter now." He predicts that the last decade has been the "layup" for a true
cultural revolution to come — he could not be specific, and his words may
strike many as more dot-com hyperbole.
It takes a special kind of gall for the same people who argued that the "long
boom" suspended the laws of economics, and even unraveled the cycles of
history, to fall back now on analysis of historical cycles to support their
arguments.
But to believe any less goes against the American grain, argued Jason
McCabe Calacanis, the editor of the now-defunct Silicon Alley Reporter.
The dot-commer, seen today as a scam artist, will be reborn, he said,
smarter and tougher, because he represents optimism itself. "It's the belief
that the future — the individual's future and the future of the economy — are
going to be better in five years than they are today."
But still. Take a look at the book "Radical E" by Glenn Rifkin and Joel
Kurtzman, which offers "Lessons on How to Rule the Web" after the bust. It
extols companies that truly understand how to marry the World Wide Web
to business. "After five tumultuous years of hype and hysteria," the authors
promise, "the real advent of the Web and e-business is now."
One of the book's chief examples of a company that does it right, Enron, has
been in the news a lot lately, though not because of astute exploitation of
e-commerce. No, Enron — which trades energy via the Web — has seen its
stock collapse 90 percent. |
