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.”

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.