Its December 2000, and by now we all know what to expect from millennial cults. Theyre all pretty much all the same, give or take a few flying saucers, natural cataclysms or New Messiahs: the world is coming to an end, only the faithful will be spared, and everybody else is doomed. (Subtext: nyah, nyah, nyah.)
So its comforting to note that, historically speaking, these apocalyptic prognosticators have had a pretty lousy track record. The Second Coming is inevitably postponed, the comet doesnt slam into the earth, and the Cosmic Space Brothers dont show up in UFOs again. The faithful, so zealous in their convictions, disappear on the heels of those ominous, overhanging nines.
At that point, the one thing you can count on is a softening in the market for end-times accessories say, freeze-dried food, ammunition or gold bullion.
Which puts me in mind of technology stocks. The NASDAQs shrinkage to half its size has some suspicious earmarks of this very same kind of apocalyptus interruptus. It appears that a heretofore unrecognized millennial cult of unstable wackos is to blame for the recent flight of high tech market capitalization: the Cult of the New Economy.
Contrary to the popular image of cult members as sallow, empty-eyed zombies lurching around airports proffering bibles, the devotees of the New Economy cult style themselves in much less threatening manner. They look a lot like you and me, in fact: just ordinary E*folks, commuting to and fro, thumbing through religious tracts like Wired and Red Herring, sipping mocha lattés . In fact, many of us didnt even realized wed joined until it was too late. Wed already drunk the Kool-aid and bought the stocks.
Though at first it may seem outrageous to characterized the financial enthusiasm for the until-recently-robust tech sector as superstition, or legions of investors both public and private as weak-willed, manipulated dupes, the similarities assert themselves nevertheless.
Certainly the Cult of the New Economy shared more than a few beliefs in common with more old-fashioned sects: the end was nigh or the end of the business world as we knew it, anyway, the one with smokestacks and supply chains and inventory and really un-righteous idolatry of hierarchy and balance sheets and discernible paths to profitability. The old ways were doomed. The world was on the brink of Total Transformation. The Internet the New Economy cults prime sacrament was going to cleanse the earth of industrial-age heathens: management, middlemen, brokers. The unredeemed, to you and me.
Like other millennial cults, it too required a hell of a lot of faith: members sold their worldly belongings or old-economy stocks, anyway and put the cash into dot-coms with escalating losses and near-infinite P/E multiples. Despite the imminent hazard, their conviction never wavered; "See you after the Revolution," theyd chant with blithe and eerie certainty, "Were all going to be millionaires." Thus did the millennial technology froth multiply and expand.
There were even gurus and charismatic leaders, from Jeff Bezos to Eric Raymond to "Stewart" on those E*Trade commercials, spreading the radical E*Gospel of day-trading, New Rules, and peer-to-peer cyber-empowerment to Industrial Age heathens. You remember: "Ridin the wave, my man," and "Bricks and mortar are sooo over," they intoned.
Hell, there might even have been covert brainwashing, in retrospect. How else can you explain the excesses of dot-com ad campaigns, where slick yet inexplicable commercials were wedged between Superbowl plays with sledgehammers of venture capital? (Im still trying to figure out some of those ads. Did they contain subliminal messages, or what?)
Worst of all, the New Economy cults recruitment techniques were particularly potent. For many investors, the pressure to join was irresistible; after months of listening to friends and office mates tout their fat portfolios and their radically accelerating 401-Ks, it became far too easy to relinquish free will and personal choice, and yield to the subjugation of the radical new E*Dogma. After all, who among us didnt want to be Saved? In the argot of the New Economy cult, the impending "Long Boom" became the investors equivalent of the Christian rapture.
Millennial cult scholar Ted Daniels of the Millennium Watch Institute has written extensively about the defining features of these groups. With startling prescience, he also seems to perfectly describe the prevailing business ethos of the New Economy cult: "People who expect the world to end soon do a lot of very strange things. They reject and even contradict the rules of common sense that keep the rest of us sane and feed our lives. They destroy the things they need to survive. They provoke fights they can't possibly win, and they talk about things that obviously won't happen." In characterizing the generic millennial cult, Daniels also seems to uncannily expose the pretzel logic behind, say, Amazon.coms business plan.
Finally, the millennial fever seems to be breaking, and there are more than a few sheepish faces about in investment circles. And now the New Economy cyber-zealots have been taken down with tech share prices, many of us are plunging our faith back into Old Economy issues like oil and manufacturing or to paraphrase Ted Daniels, those sober, formerly unfashionable, smoke-stack-ish endeavors that actually put food in our mouths.
And thats probably for the best; it takes more than bandwidth to keep body and soul together. I, for one, never really planned to live by E-commerce alone. But it did feel great to be Saved, to be one of the chosen, if only for a millennial moment.
Thomas Scoville is either an Information Age savant or an ex-Silicon Valley programmer with a bad attitude. He is the author of Silicon Follies, to be published in January by Pocket Books.