The Future Is Virtual
The years between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s witnessed the rapid adoption of internet technology in the private business world. That decade also marked an exception, as Robert Gordon notes, to the general stagnation of GDP growth that has otherwise marked the American economy since the early 1970s. The novelty of internet technology, combined with the very real—however temporary—uptick in total factor productivity and economic growth had profound consequences for how American cultural and political leaders thought about the potential for the internet to reshape economic life.
This paper considers the internet’s first decade within the larger story of the cultural, political, and intellectual history of “entrepreneur hype.” It explores the growth and spread of the notion that internet connectivity offered people an opportunity make their own way in the economy, free from the confines of traditional employment. I argue that internet culture build on a pre-existing set of cultural assumptions and biases that had been marinating for decades about the virtue of self-employment. As internet use spread in the 1990s, a cadre of boosters, zealots, prophets, and profiteers all took advantage of that environment to promote the internet as an unprecedented tool for entrepreneurship. This paper pays particular attention to the incidents of fraud, deception, and mis-applied hype—from the more-or-less legitimate example of day-trading and house-flipping to the much shadier instances of internet-based scams and the proliferation of multi-level marketing “opportunities” (HerbalLife, etc.).
