Steve Cisler on Sat, 12 May 2001 19:57:22 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Ruins of a new economy |
To the organizers of Tulipomania in Amsterdam: pat yourself on the back but don't dislocate your shoulder. Steve --- May 13, 2001 New York Times Magazine The Peculiar Ruins of the New Economy Photograph by RICHARD BARNES Text by DAVID BROOKS We used up the zeitgeist of the 1990's, and now we're trying to sell it off. In the photograph at right, taken at the Santa Clara Convention Center, there are rows and rows of secondhand monitors, hard drives and keyboards ready for auction. But it's really the spirit of a decade that's being put on the remainder desk. For Sale: One Previously Owned Cultural Moment/Now Slightly Embarrassing. It's goodbye to the epoch -- which must have lasted all of seven years -- in which people chatted excitedly about free-agent nations, distance being dead, I.P.O.'s, the long boom and those dot-com ads during the Super Bowl that showed global children united by the wonders of instant communication. One minute you've got zip-drive techies pulling all-nighters amid their look-at-me-I'm-wacky workstations, and the next moment -- poof -- it seems so stale. Suddenly, it doesn't really matter much if the speed of microprocessors doubles with the square root of every lunar eclipse (or whatever Moore's Law was). And so just like a used-bong sale in 1978 or a yellow-tie auction in 1990, scenes like this, replicated across the country, bring a psychological decade to a sobering close. What started out as the biggest revolution in communications since Gutenberg ends up as a giant yard sale. Ironists will note that the technological revolution, which was supposed to move us beyond materialism, certainly is producing a lot of junk. Schadenfreuders, on the other hand, are now getting more pleasure out of the dot-com collapse than the dot-commers ever got out of their ascent. But scenes like this one are sweetly sad more than anything. We Americans produce miserable ruins. While other empires leave behind the glories of their civilizations -- the Parthenon, the Colosseum -- we leave behind the detritus of our unsustainable enthusiasms. In our homes, most of us have a closet where we keep the remains of failed hobbies, the beer-making kit, for instance, as well as the binoculars and the Audubon guides. The dot-com moment was the same sort of thing on a massive scale. There was this new activity that seemed so fresh and engrossing, and it was going to herald a new era in the human spirit. People left respectable publications and Wall Street firms to work at Web outfits with names like Suck and Pets.com. They stocked up on all this gear. But then it didn't fulfill the dreams, which were sweet and noble if a little unrealistic. Of course, people are still using computers. And somebody will buy all the machines in the picture. What's gone is the sense that the people who are using the stuff are on the cutting edge of history and everyone else is road kill. Some of the Internet geeks really did believe this, and because they believed it, and were making squazillions of dollars believing it, the rest of us paid attention. Palo Alto and Redmond seemed like places where history was made, the epicenters of a decade's self-consciousness, the way Woodstock was in the 60's and Wall Street was in the 80's. Now we're at one of those pivot moments, when one fascination pales and the next object of our entrancement and contempt hasn't come into view. What will it be? Biotech? Religion? Only Madonna knows for sure. In the meantime, I find myself somehow resenting the unceremonious way we say goodbye to idealistic illusions. The mere fact that the dreams don't come true doesn't mean that it's all right to go ahead and cannibalize them for spare parts. We should burn them, Viking style, in a great funeral pyre. A bonfire of the buzz. Let's take this end-of-decade moment to celebrate the American ability to come up with an endless series of impossible dreams. Steve Cisler 4415 Tilbury Drive San Jose, California 95130 408 379 9076 http://home.inreach.com/cisler "There are some places where the road keeps going." - Bud Parker # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net