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The dot-com season of the witch


Updated: Mon, Oct 15 9:54 AM EDTby John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine


New Age nuttiness has insidiously infiltrated the Internet to its detriment, says John Dvorak. Hey you one-time hippies, go home!


When I look out my window, Many sights to see, And when I look in my window, So many different people to be... You've got to pick up every stitch, The rabbits running in the ditch, Beatniks are out to make it rich, Oh, no, must be the season of the witch. 'Donovan, pre-Internet song lyrics

COMMENTARY-- The Donovan song Season of the Witch appeared before the stock market crash of 1969. When the song is sung today, the lyric Beatniks are out to make it rich is usually replaced with Hippies are out to make it rich. In fact, many of the problems the industry is going through today are attributable to the lingering greed of the baby boomers, the crackpot notions of New Age nutballs, and the simple nuttiness and idealism of the one-time hippies.

The decline began with the idealistic notion that the Internet was some sort of great liberating force. For the first few years, the forces of revolution battled with the forces of mercantilism. The first appearance of banner ads on Web pages was cause for alarm. All the early Internet mavens were dead set against any sort of advertising on the Net. The initial quasi-socialistic view of the Net mandated that everything be free.

This thinking soon devolved into West Coast libertarianism, which led the Net into a deterioration of porn, spam, and viruses. The assault of unwanted communications postponed acceptance of e-mail as the primary form of communication. It also stalled the acceptance of the Web as a tool for knowledge access, as the assaulted masses closed rank within the confines of the feudal castle known as AOL, where 30 million core Internet users now live and honestly believe that AOL is the Internet. During this transition arose the anomaly known as the dot-com phenomenon.

Such craziness hasn't occurred since the Dutch tulip market of 1636, when bulbs were traded and valued to be worth more than most people's annual incomes. During the peak of tulip mania, some observers claimed that the entire world's financial market would be tulip-based. It was a new economy.

The concept that the economy would change fundamentally because of tulip bulbs is no less wacky than the claims of a new economy suddenly emerging because of a hodge-podge computer network filled with security holes.

During the new economy, Internet IPO run-ups, the nuttiness of the hippies, and the New Age movement came into play. There was no rationale for any of it. But who needs a rationale when you have insanity? The mania was aptly led by ex-hippie baby boomers and their naive 20-something minions, who honestly believed that just because they graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business, they actually knew something. These wunderkinder became the CEOs, the rage, then the scapegoats.

Track down any of the players in this game and you'll find a preponderance of aging Grateful Dead heads. You'll discover that many of the wunderkind CEOs closed down their companies for a week so their employees could go to Burning Man, a brain-dead art fest in the Nevada desert best described as a drug bender highlighted by naked men on bicycles. Everyone got to cheer and do pagan chants as a three-story wooden icon of a man was burned to the ground on the last day. The dot-com folks were deeply into this and other crackpot scenes. Does this give us any insight into the new economy?

The giveaway for me was the New Age use of language. The dot-com scene became more of a cult than a scene, with its own terminology. E-business was about viral marketing, vortals, clicks and mortar, disintermediation, prosuming, push, channels, communities, B2B B2C, C2C, and so on.

Everything operated on a whole new time scale: Internet time! If you even hinted that this was all hogwash, then you just didn't get it. That phrase came directly out of Werner Erhard's defunct est training, which was so popular in the self-actualization 1970s. It was used to expunge nonbelievers from the cult.

Well, the cult is dead, and the new economy is just the old economy. We're left with an Internet that is a spam-riddled shambles. We have streaming-media nonevents, thousands of dead dot-coms, broadband malaise, and a tech industry left in a mess. Let's hope we don't go through this again anytime soon.

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