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Singing the old stressed-out dot-com blues
Analysis/Commentary
The Net Economy brings with it a new set of expectations in
terms of performance and self-sacrifice. See that urban sprawl
out there? in Silicon Valley, moving now north and south of
San Francisco, then south to L.A.'s Glendale, and
now into San Diego, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Virginia,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York? See the dot-comers
and dot-goers? See them doing the dot-crazy, dot-com dance?
Yes, America, in discovering the New Economy, is
also discovering woes: over-built and over-priced housing,
crowded highways and gridlocked parking garages, wall-to-wall
techies and e-commerce strategists. It's almost as if the Old
World decided overnight to displace itself to the New World,
and the countryside to surge upon the city. In the gold-rush
atmosphere of this year's e-commerce offensive, worklife has
become a vocation akin to total war, with quick riches the
cause and proximate goal.
The telephone rings non-stop. Each week brings a swarm of new faces
that start out fresh and pink, and turn from red to gray. The
atmosphere of volunteerism is almost religious, and
borders occasionally on the fanatical. The stress is invigorating, when
it isn't deadly. Dot-com mania defeats workers' age-old alliances
to their locales, their tribal identities as Virginians, or Texans,
or what-nots. The electronic wire introduces looser, larger bonds,
and a form of association very different from community -- or
communalism.
The new era has erected the virtual city, painted life the color
of night, where youth and middle age mingle, where populations feast
like locusts on their work environments, and raise anthills or long
trails of plodding gridlock. Already some buildings are forcing
charities out in California, and the new success stories -- the
mushroomed IPOs -- are creating work camps as frenzied as the
boomvilles of the '49-ers.
Is it all worth it? Certainly. This year, e-commerce and e-business
seem to be blending in a strange and dynamic way; businesses throw out
old rules about the sanctimony of competitive barriers, enemies are
suddenly friends, and friends are, well, usually a little behind the
times. Where once the goal of business was to sell products or services,
companies develop virtual -- er -- product-services, in the form of
shared resources and bartered potentialities. Information becomes
a new form of trade, and confidence a leverageable asset.
-- "I'll trade you twenty information chits for ten units of
confidence. What do you say?"
-- "Deal."
In the meantime, human resources get stretched to the limit, and,
if they don't crack, they'll stretch some more next year and the next,
when commerce goes global, when brand identities perform cross-cultural,
cross-industrial leaps, when the Net becomes "real" for those who
thought it wasn't.
'Til then, the troops pile into their bedroom communities,
nursing their long hours, and singing those homesick stressed-out
dot-com blues.
July 12, 2000
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