[Nettime-bold] Ruins of a new economy

["Steve Cisler" <cisler@pobox.com>]

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


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