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.