When people recall the dot-com boom of 25 years back, what comes up inevitably are the dumb mascots, the dumb stocks, the last hurrah of America Online with its inescapable CDs. The late 1990s exist in the collective memory like the punk rock and brown suits of the 1970s — the surface is easy to recall, the feeling much harder. What gets lost is that it was in many ways a time of genuine optimism about technology. I was brought back to that time by an article from musician and writer Elizabeth Nelson. The column takes us back to what can only be called the golden age of music piracy, when everyone quit buying music en masse and instead downloaded their 500 favorite albums for free. A lot of claims were made then about how when everything shook out, music and musicians would be better off without the filter of the rapacious music industry.
But the corporate music industry did not wither away after all. The business has done fine, as have the superstars. Music probably hasn't done so badly (I don't recall "Livin' la Vida Loca" with special fondness). What did disappear, however, was the tier of working musicians who could make a living selling their music to devoted fans. The hollowing out of the middle is paralleled in many other areas — the end of the midlist book has been the sad story of print publishing. The hope back then was that putting tools and distribution into the hands of many more people would spur a creative outpouring. Instead, success has become ever more concentrated. In so many areas, the promise of technology has not been realized. But disappointed as I have been, I think back to the optimism of the early years of the internet — formative years for me — not with the thought that we were wrong. Rather, I hope technology might still make good on those early promises of advancing creativity and democracy.
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