In addition to the political and economic changes that brought about the new economy, there were new ways of talking about risk. These new ways of discussing risk led to new ways in which people managed, dealt with, and expressed risk. And, as we’ll see in this chapter, these ways of dealing with risk in turn led to new exposures. The dot-com era was both a rhetorical and discursive strategy for reframing work relationships of the new economy. As Nigel Thrift put it, it was in part the “the romance” of exciting, interesting, and risky new jobs in a rapidly growing field, not the financial rewards, that attracted many people to work in the dot-com boom.34 This allure combined with the newness of many companies in the Internet industry meant that workplace-level changes flourished in the industry. With few established conventions or work practices, dot-coms could reinvent professional work as fun, young, and exciting, turning jobs from white-collar into what Andrew Ross has called “no-collar.”35 As new companies in a new industry, they emerged distinct from established institutions and models of work in older industries, and the individualism of this new era could thrive. Fred Turner has convincingly argued that early cyberculture was deeply influenced by a particular brand of political libertarianism of the countercultural movement.36 Similarly, the culture of risk was just as important to the rise of the commercial Internet. Surely, the economic rhetoric of both Clinton and Reagan resonated with the changes that people felt; in turn, political talk helped shape a culture that accepted economic risk. While wide-reaching economic and political changes precede the dot-com boom, these changes informed and supported a cultural shift that occurred—making risk a central narrative in how people talk about their work. Not only did these changes set the ground for a new economy, but the discursive shift toward risky work also helped constitute new work practices and new relations to work. Decades of industrial change hinged on a fulcrum between two regimes—an “old” industrial economy in which economic growth and cultural norms supported stable employment practices in a “new” information, cultural, and technological economy driven by highly individualized and flexible work. This distinction between the old and new economy I have shown in this chapter is not a clear-cut one, and the rhetoric and reality of the scope of the economic changes was hotly debated at the time. But accompanying this discussion of a new, “renewed” innovative economy was talk of risk taking, entrepreneurship, and individual initiative that informed the ways in which people think about their jobs. It is in this economic, political, and cultural environment that a new medium arose, and embedded into these new technologies and messages were the entrepreneurial values of the people who were creating it, as we will begin to see in the next chapter.

However, this knowledge is now matched with distrust in the institutions that could help individuals hedge their bets. As Van Loon put it, in a risk society “closures offered by expertise, legislation and moral panics are no longer met with trust in the systems that produced them.”42 We have replaced the old economy with something we no longer trust, although we have more information about the risks. Less trust in institutions such as the government and corporations means people are placing relatively more trust in themselves, whether or not by necessity. This in turn further diminishes the ways in which people press institutions like the government to provide security. To a large degree, the arrangements that used to buffer American workers from economic insecurity—such as expectations of corporate job loyalty and increased government support for jobs growth—have been replaced by mechanisms that place the burden of risk more squarely on the shoulders of individuals. How have people adapted to these changes through their decisions, their career choices, and their approach to their jobs?

One strategy for managing the risk of contemporary work is what I call venture labor. Venture labor is the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources that ordinary employees make in the companies where they work. Venture labor is the explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by nonentrepreneurs. Venture labor refers to an investment by employees into their companies or how they talk about their time at work as an investment. When people think of their jobs as an investment or as having a future payoff other than regular wages, they embody venture labor. Venture labor is the way in which people act like entrepreneurs and bear some of the risks of their companies. Venture labor includes the entrepreneurial aspects of work—how people behave as if they have ownership in their companies, even when they are not actual owners. Venture labor is about people taking risks for their jobs, as much as it is about their subjective embrace of that risk.

Another form of venture labor involves shifting managerial responsibility onto the employees themselves. Flexible, short-term, project-based workplaces place more responsibility for getting and keeping work on employees themselves. Heightened job insecurity means workers are increasingly exposed to cyclical economic risk, and flexible workplaces have placed increased managerial responsibility on their employees. As one cofounder of a news web site put it, “I don’t want someone who’s going to ask, ‘What’s my job?’ I need someone who’s going to figure out that on their own.” Considering the quick turnaround times on the development of computer applications, employees are expected, in the words of one programmer, to “hit the ground running” with continually updated skills, including new programming languages and familiarity with new technologies. This “individualization of the labor process,” as Manuel Castells termed it, aims at “decentralizing management, individualizing work, and customizing markets, thereby segmenting work and fragmenting societies.”47 Being in companies with less middle management and administrative support gives them a feeling of more autonomy in their work and, ironically, a greater sense of attachment to the very companies that have eliminated loyalty within the organizational culture.

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. But these attitudes and rhetoric about being one’s own boss and having control over one’s company did not emerge by chance or in a vacuum. The social context for this frenzy and the rush to boldly take risks occurred in the midst of major structural change from an economy in which 30 percent of the workforce was unionized to the wide acceptance of at-will employment. The attitudes toward risk that we saw during the dot-com boom happened in the context of the shift from a workplace where regular, full-time employment was the norm to a growing percentage of the American workforce in nonstandard jobs, many lacking health insurance, pensions, and training. Risk presented a choice when jobs were shifting from the security of regular employment to flexible hiring to meet demand only when times were good.

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 thing. The strong lure of the rewards to risk during the dot-com era created a volatile situation in which risk taking seems to be a way to have control over the economy. By taking risks, people feel as though they have some control over outcomes in a seemingly increasingly capricious labor market. But this embrace of individual risk taking may hinder the ability to collectively demand and create good stable jobs and workplaces for everyone.

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 company that Louis Gerstner Jr., IBM’s chief executive, was trying to project. In August 1994 he said to employees, “We operate as an entrepreneurial organization with a minimum of bureaucracy and a never-ending focus on productivity.”7 Under Gerstner’s leadership, the image of IBM went from that of a large stable company with long-term employment to an “entrepreneurial” company. Netscape and IBM represented two different models of work in the technology sector. Not only did the two companies bitterly compete over how their customers would access the web, but at stake was which of their models for the workplace would prevail in the new economy. In many ways, 1994 marked the beginning of the new economy with both the Netscape initial public offering (IPO) and the IBM layoffs, and both show the institutional arrangements, technological developments, and rhetorical shifts that made possible the dot-com boom and created the environment for New York’s Silicon Alley. Both companies represent a spectrum of how technology in the 1990s was framed—at once sure, staid, and stable and young, rule-breaking, and edgy.

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 salvage an economy. The Internet industry in many ways represented the purest of these technological fantasies—unprecedented economic growth without the messiness of hardware manufacturing, industrial start-up investments, or slowness of the “old economy” ways of working. The prevailing message: the creation of a communication medium—the Internet—could drive economic growth and security, create wealth, and revitalize the economy.

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 real and provide the context for understanding the shift in the culture of corporate loyalty. This shift had a political dimension as politicians shaped new rhetoric to explain what was happening. In this chapter, I argue that the dot-com boom of the late 1990s through the year 2000 marked a political, economic, and cultural transition that had already begun by the time the commercialized Internet appeared. These political, economic, and cultural shifts emphasized individual responsibility over collective, corporate, and government security and embraced individual economic opportunity. With these changes, entrepreneurialism became celebrated as a means of fixing an economy that was creaking under the weight of aging manufacturing base, losing ground internationally, and struggling to recalibrate a delicate postwar balance of welfare state and corporate benevolence. Rather than being determined solely by the technological change of the Internet, major economic, political, and cultural changes in the United States paved the way for the dot-com era and for the prevalence of entrepreneurial attitudes necessary for it.

Innovation alone cannot be blamed for this shift in workplace culture. Before the rise of Internet firms, technology companies were considered stable places to work. Companies like IBM and Kodak Eastman are examples of American companies that were the technology leaders of their time, while offering phenomenal benefits, wages, and job security compared to the rest of the economy. Kodak Eastman offered its employees company housing, in-house health care, productivity planning to minimize layoffs, profit-sharing, and jobless benefits paid out of its own private fund.19 In this arrangement, bigger organizations paid more than smaller companies, in part because they shared more profits, more equitably, among their employees. One economist showed that before the 1980s 70 percent of company profits were shared with workers, which echoes findings from other economists that profits were more evenly distributed between shareholders and employee stakeholders before the 1990s.20