by
Gina Neff
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Another cultural shift was an emerging rhetoric around financial markets. What people say about markets, to some extent, makes markets.43 Nigel Thrift has called the new economy a “rhetorical fabrication,”44 and others have argued that to dismiss the rhetorical flourishes of the new economy is to miss the “symbolic efficiency of discourse, the way it structures our experience of reality.”45 Some media representations matter more than others, of course, in this discursive feedback loop of market perception, financial market representation, and continual monitoring of markets by market makers. The Financial Times presented itself as “the newspaper of the new economy,”46 and Business Week, which first used the term “new economy” in 1994, became a strong advocate of the concept within the media. An explosion in the number of financial media outlets including twenty-four-hour television channels, increases in the amount of reporting on finance by the mainstream media and the number of advertisements for financial services companies, and the concentration of information in “news, information, and technology” companies like Reuters and Bloomberg helped spur the rise of these narratives about financial markets and economic growth.47 As Thrift has argued, these narratives about finance were “an attempt at mass motivation, which, if successful, could result in a new kind of market culture—or a spiritual renewal of an old one.”48 Not only did this discourse constitute the market, it was, as Thrift argues, an attempt to reconstitute a new economy itself.
Many of these experiments emerged from early creative endeavors but were often later linked to financial business models whether through advertising, sponsorship, or other such means. Silicon Alley’s early period of experimentation—and the early days of the Internet industry—brought information to technology, connecting conceptually hardware and software companies with the work of new media, creating the symbolic space for a new industry centered on new media to emerge. The paths of the edgy downtown webzines crossed with those of corporate magazine publishing and advertising already located in Manhattan. Andrew Ross called this process of corporate interests overtaking the Silicon Alley “the industrialization of bohemia.” The history of Silicon Alley is more complicated for two reasons. First, while Ross’s term adequately describes what happened within some successful content companies, it implies cooptation of independence, rather than a longer and more mutual intertwining of corporate and artistic goals, as was the case in Silicon Alley. Second, the term also implies an earlier, uncorrupted state of independent Internet production. The social process by which Internet production moved from high-cultural elite artistic and cultural production to mass-distributed objects included both the influence of corporate media and that of independent, alternative culture on the norms, values, and aesthetics of Silicon Alley. I would argue that it is better to think about the bohemianization of industry—that new media became a model of the new economy, in which creativity functioned for capitalism. Sweeping technological changes meant that people who understood the Internet’s potential as a medium positioned themselves as business revolutionaries. Creative people suddenly found new economic value in their artistic work. And for a cohort of underemployed college graduates, Silicon Alley presented the opportunities of a growth industry. The experimentation, both cultural and economic, in Silicon Alley intertwined with the economy’s growing culture of risk so that this spirit of risk taking was flexible enough to adapt to multiple motivations.
nice
For Alan, there was certainly an upside for the company in terms of issuing stock options to employees. When asked if equity holding made a difference in his attitude and loyalty to the company, he replied:
Yeah, absolutely. Even looking at the start-up, not everyone was a shareholder. And especially when the company doesn’t look like it’s going to take off, then you realize your options are not going to be worth anything so it’s hard to be motivated. Yeah, absolutely. At [the larger satellite company], we had shares . . . , but it wasn’t like they were going to take off or something based on something we did. Whereas, with [the Internet start-up] the things that you did could affect the company and could affect the value of your holdings. So it gives you a sense of power. More of a sense of worth. For working at [the defense contractor] I guess there is a patriotic aspect. But working for them in Silicon Valley with all these millionaires sprouting up, it’s a little hard to justify working in a place like that. Even though, you know, if you stay there you can retire at age fifty-eight and play golf the rest of your life. That’s what my dad did. He worked for [an oil company] for thirty-five years, and he plays a lot of golf but his golf game still stinks.
jesus lol
The question Finn asked—“Why did people believe in what they believed in?”—becomes even more germane after the crash because the culture of risk that was so prevalent during the dot-com boom survived the dot-com crash. In this comment, he recognizes that something had become calcified, “worshipped” even, while at the same time he could not understand why this calcification was historically fragile. His struggle to make sense of the crash calls to mind a line from Karl Marx, which has been taken up by postmodern social theorists such as Marshall Berman and Zygmunt Bauman: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”2 Or as Angela McRobbie has written, this is the way that “capitalism seems to absolve itself from responsibility by creating invisible structures, and by melting down or liquefying the old social order.”3 Why did people believe that the fledging dot-coms might have a future and how did their seemingly solid financial and creative futures melt, seemingly into air?
Neither top financiers nor industry watchers could predict when, by how much, or for how long the markets would fall. West Coast venture capitalist Tim Draper dressed up as Batman for the March 2000 launch party of Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s $100 million “Gotham” fund, only weeks before the crash.8 Alley Cat News featured the headline “When the Money Keeps Rolling In: 20 VCs Fueling the Growth of Silicon Alley” on its January 2000 cover, even though that money would slow to a trickle just a few weeks after the issue ran. AtNewYork in its end-of-year issue wrote that money “flowed into Silicon Alley in 1999 at a pace that shocked anyone who still remembers the struggling days of shared Ethernet connections, illegal loft apartment offices, and pirated software.”
lmao
The dot-com crash also shows how people revert to a lens of individual experience to explain changes to economic structures. For people in Silicon Alley, their aspirations were quite different from the notions of the “American Dream” for a previous generation—they valued creative and economic freedom, independence, and making an impact. They framed economic success and failure using very individual terms when talking about their careers, constructing narratives of individual choice and responsibility to represent their particular economic consequences. Even though observers laid the blame for the crash on speculative capitalism, people in Silicon Alley represented their economic situations as something personal and something over which they had control. Taken together, these narratives present the recurring theme that success in the new economy is based on taking chances and making lucky choices—as opposed to, say, hard work, determination, loyalty, or a multitude of other possible narratives about economic success. People working in Silicon Alley may have overestimated or misrepresented their chances at success, however they defined it. They may have had incomplete information or misjudged their personal capacity to affect change within their companies. These valuations worked together to help create a situation in which economic growth seemed inevitable, but people blamed themselves for not being savvy enough when that turned out to be false. In this sense, I don’t mean to argue that people are necessarily driven solely by logics of economic rationality, but rather that this notion of choice became a powerful way that active agents turned away from looking at other structural positions and possibilities for success and failure. Rather than placing blame on the economy or the stock market, people blamed themselves, suggesting on some level that they thought that they might be able to outwit the market.
Venture labor gives us a conceptual hook to understand changes to the nature of work and to understanding evolutions in new media. Venture labor, work that entails bearing entrepreneurial risk, is an explicit continuation and intensification of trends that began with deindustrialization. While “venturing” is not new—just think of the many who staked potential fortunes on the gold rush—compensating workers with stock options for part or all of their salary is relatively new, at least below upper-management level. Work in cultural industries has always been riskier for the people working in them. But what I have tried to present in this book are the financial implications of the shift of the burden of risk onto employees, the implications for media making in the digital era, and the potential of the application of the concept of venture labor to other industries. This suggests that venture labor is in part a response to changes in workplace security, the increased individualization of risk through health and retirement benefits, and structural changes across the economy.
My fieldwork uncovered the cultural frames that workers used to calculate value in their jobs—and by extension to frame and manage the risks they perceived they faced. Their acceptance and management of risk served capitalist functions by supporting the growth of companies and industries. In effect, their individual-level, culturally informed explanations that my respondents offered for how people get ahead, why work is meaningful, and how to navigate a career in this field masked the social or collective forces at play within their jobs. This does not bode well for creating a sense of old-fashioned solidarity among workers facing increased uncertainty. To echo the words of one of my unemployed respondents after the crash, when a job is thought of as an investment—and not as a right, an obligation, or an earned position—losing a job can seem like “easy come, easy go.” A sense of moral outrage or indignation at being part of an economic arrangement that devalues work and views, in Louis Uchitelle’s terms, workers as “disposable” is missing when people use these investment frames to understand their choices.25
Venture labor stood in for venture capital—both in the real sense of resources needed to build companies and in terms of seemingly being an accessible option for wealth accumulation of middle-class knowledge workers. This plays into the political right’s rhetoric of the “ownership society” that employs the middle-class dream of profiting from ownership. Whether from one’s labor or one’s home, the false dream of the ownership society promises that generating profits in a capitalist society is as easy as cashing a paycheck or paying the mortgage. So-called ownership society ownership comes without power, just as the stock option holders of Silicon Alley exercised little power over their companies’ choices. Similarly, the U.S. housing market crisis exposed the culpability of middle-class investments in a global financial marketplace.
I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.
just a nice snapshot of an era