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The decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States left a cultural vacuum that the rhetoric of the Internet filled. Changes in the economy, in markets, and in political rhetoric all supported the idea that the growth of dot-coms would continue indefinitely and that these new technologies could …

Social scientists have studied the transition from the post–World War II reliance on industrial and manufacturing sectors to a “postindustrial” or service-based economy. The changes that came to be called the “new economy” in the 1990s are a continuation of that transition. The economic shifts are …

By the time layoffs and early retirement programs ended, IBM had almost halved its workforce from 405,500 people to 225,000.5 One-fifth of those laid-off employees came back as consultants, a practice that became increasingly common in the 1990s.6 Making IBM “leaner” matched the image of the compan…

Risk gives the appearance of choice, power, and individual agency. As such, risk provides a powerful justification for the lack of security in jobs in the new economy. If anything, capitalism’s social innovation during the dot-com boom was to make images of risk and the lack of job security a good …

Risk created a sense of choice, oftentimes false, that pervaded tech workers’ narratives about their careers. For people who worked in Internet start-up companies, the risks they took represented, in their own words, their hopes and dreams and “only the upside” in the words of a software engineer. …