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The 1990s were a magical, optimistic time for technology. The Cold War was over, economic opportunity was booming, and it appeared as if we were finally on track to achieving world peace. “The future” was finally here. Although these were factors that primarily applied to the United States, their effects were also felt worldwide, thanks to a new technology which quite literally connected all of us together and manifested an attitude which hadn’t really existed prior at such a large scale: the ambition to change the world. This technology was called the Internet.

You may have been born too late to explore the earth, and too early to explore the universe, but don’t fret, there was now a whole, new world out there that remained largely untouched: the Cyberspace. Travel would now be for pleasure rather than necessity; you could meet whoever you want, be whoever you want, instantly and with just the click of a button. Much like the vast, unending space to the internet itself, people felt there was no limits to what their capabilities were. And naturally, hundreds, then thousands of websites would pop up, providing services for just about anything. Venture capitalists were ALL over it, throwing money at just about anything that ended in (dot)com, taking the already flourishing economy to limits that were beyond comprehension. For the first time, anything was possible, and any opportunity was good opportunity. But what happens when you take this too far?

What followed would be an economic disaster of global proportions. As much as $5 trillion lost, thousands of businesses now bankrupt with very few survivors left over, and a recession has formed. The once flourishing, seemingly unstoppable force of the World Wide Web, now returning to the valuations it had before its commercialization in 1995. Perhaps this wasn’t a new medium for achieving the American Dream, but instead just an economic bubble: “the DotCom Bubble” as it would soon be coined. The entire ordeal showcased that this new cyberspace was really just a continuation of the real world and its very real problems, rather than some utopian escape from it. It was the illusion of success and a false pursuit of happiness that led to such devastation which left people no other choice than to lose most of their trust in this new digital realm, instead of, you know, looking inward.

But what do these things entail? In retrospect, avoiding the catastrophic results of the dotcom bubble seems very obvious. How could some of the brightest investors in the world make such ridiculous decisions? Did people really not learn from the mistakes of the past? What’s interesting about the dotcom bubble is that, it does share many parallels to the economic crises that have surfaced throughout history, but just like the internet itself at the time, was something new and faced problems that hadn’t existed before. And these problems were intensified by a sensationalized yet uncertain outlook on the future. So, what was the strange tale of the dotcom bubble, and how do we prevent something like it from ever happening again?


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Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod
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