Dot-comic relief

Reasons to be glad the bubble is bursting

by Stephen Heuser

The Internet changed my world last month when I met three people for dinner in Cambridge and realized I was the only one at the table not personally starting a dot-com company. One guy told me earnestly about the "B2B angle" of his company, which didn't exist yet, and then its "B2C angle." One guy had already sold a company that didn't exist yet.

Me, I wanted to talk movies. I felt like a fossil.

It all happened so fast. Dot-coms -- small, mobile, imaginary -- spread through the culture like wildfire. I don't know how much real impact they've had on the world, but they've grabbed a huge share of the popular imagination. People gobble up the tales of sudden money, stock options, lavish offices equipped with foosball tables, 26-year-olds incurring vast dollar losses that somehow lead to the acquisition of exotic sports cars and very large boats. The novelty is astounding, and everything is breathless and new. Here in Boston, one of the most distinguished mansions in the Back Bay was just bought by an investor who wants to turn it into an "incubator" -- a type of office that, two years ago, didn't even exist!

And so on. Am I the only person who doesn't find this all absolutely electrifying? The Internet is handy, sure, but to me the New Economy sounds a lot like the old economy, only now it's considered interesting to talk about over beers.

Fortunately, this is about to change.

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I'm no Luddite, but a little thrill runs through me every time the NASDAQ shudders, quivers, and drops 200 points. This is it, I think. The dot-com bubble is deflating. This whole spiraling New Economy thing is slowly, gently returning to earth.

And yeah, I might lose some money if things really get messy. But I'll gain so much more in psychic well-being. Because I'll never hear the word "convergence" again. No one will murmur "pure Net play" over a glass of Scotch.

Business plans will stop being called "sexy."

I keep thinking of this phrase, come the revolution. The first revolution has already come -- yes, we all buy stuff on computers now, and the Encyclopedia Britannica is no longer published on paper -- but as with every revolution, eventually the revolutionaries themselves need to be overthrown. When I think "come the revolution," that's the revolution I'm looking forward to. I've even given the expression a good New Economy abbreviation: CTR.

CTR, no one will say "B2B" with a straight face. CTR, it will be okay to go out to bars and speak English again, maybe even talk about movies.

CTR, it will also be okay to speak English on the telephone. As a newspaper editor, I get a lot of phone calls from publicists trying to convince me to assign stories about new companies. In the past year I have noticed these calls getting more and more abstract. It has become a game -- discover the point at which the publicist admits she doesn't know what the company actually, um, does. Is it a "personal networking community"? An
"adventure-sports portal"? Both? Neither? CTR, "multimedia concept" will not be considered an adequate way to describe your employer.

CTR, no one will say "multimedia concept" at all. Or "dot com," or "IPO," a term that will retreat to its burrow on Wall Street and stop making the rest of us jealous. No one will talk about being vested, or about connectivity, repurposing, interactivity, cybersquatting, collaborative filtering, frictionless commerce, virtual anything, e-anything, i-anything, or click-through -- at least not in public. No one will talk about competing for "eyeballs" or "mindshare." CTR, Internet time will run at 60 seconds to the minute, just like normal time. (Actually, to judge by my personal Web connection, it will run considerably slower than normal time.) The two-letter word "at" will return to the language. Company names like "e-fax.com" will revert to meaninglessness.

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CTR, profit-and-loss statements will once again be considered boring.

TEN YEARS ago I spent the summer working for a magazine in Silicon Valley. With all due respect to Oliver Wendell Holmes, never in my life have I had a stronger sense of being smack at the hub of the solar system. It was -- it is -- taken for granted by everyone in Silicon Valley that the valley is the only place on earth. Even the financiers in New York -- who, meanwhile, were thinking that they were in the center of the universe -- were considered satellite players. The real show was in Northern California.

In a sense, the rise of "dot-com culture" is really the spread of that particular feeling to every cluster of young college grads in the country, to every town with two high-tech companies to rub together, to everyone with a modem and a bright idea. It's kind of sweet, this democratization of the capitalist impulse, but it's also a collective delusion -- albeit a delusion amped up with a lot of cash.

You may have noticed it in your own dot-commified friends. There is a whole dot-com mindset that takes over, a kind of energetic vacuity accompanied by pity for those who don't yet "get it." As new as this all seems, our culture actually has a precedent for this, the glazed look, the collective delusion fueled by large donations, the belief that nothing matters beyond the people who share your precise set of beliefs. The precedent is called a cult.

Skeptics in the financial world realize this, and they've coined a term for Internet investing: they call it "drinking the Kool-Aid." CTR, the Kool-Aid will wear off. Personally, I will know the Kool-Aid has worn off when my gym stops showing midday stock reports on the TVs near the treadmills.

I'm not going to gloat when the dot-com bubble well and truly collapses, because I didn't hate it while it was inflating. I didn't love it either; it was just there, like that Star Wars movie that everyone talked about last summer. That movie eventually went away, and so will the stock reports at my gym. Possibly soon. Beyond the NASDAQ shudders, there are already signs that the revolution has come: U.S. News & World Report recently reported on an Internet company that refused to add ".com" to its name, for fear of being thought flaky.

Get outta here! Next thing you know, they'll get rid of the foosball table. I know an office that needs one.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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