The dot-­com boom busted shortly ­after it began due to overconfidence and failed investment strategies (perhaps something akin to the mass tech layoffs transpiring at the time of this writing in 2023). While the crash led to a decrease in rental and home prices in the Bay Area, it also impelled the restructuring of surviving companies into more robust cap­i­tal­ist machines led by Apple, Cisco, and Intel. Google and Facebook became rising stars, and then—in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis which wrecked the slow gains made by ­people of color to build equity and secure stable housing across the region—­Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and sharing economy start-­ups headquartered in San Francisco blossomed overnight. Twitter/X also launched in San Francisco, nestled into what soon became known as the Twitter Tax Break Zone, where tech companies avoid paying city taxes. As Wendy Liu offers of Tech 2.0 dreams:

Silicon Valley is more than a region in northern California that has become synonymous with the high-­tech industry. It is a dream. It is the dream of a world with new rules and new rulers, based on the princi­ples of meritocracy and efficiency and hacking your way to the top. It is the dream of the win-­win: innovation that generates profit through frictionless experiences and synergistic efficiencies, not exploitation. It is the dream that a hacker playground with unimaginable wealth and minimal outside supervision is indisputably making the world a better place. But what may be a dream for a select few is steadily becoming a nightmare for every­one ­else.