• Management within dotcoms was often portrayed as the battleground of inter-generational warfare. The grim reality was that many of these companies were 'digital sweatshops' (Fraser, 2001); staff were constantly threatened with 'down-sizing' (Sennett, 1998). Workers were reduced by cybernetic management techniques and psychological testing to personnel-profiling tools (Levidow and Robins, 1989: 30). Age-cohort analysis and sociopolitical trends (Howe and Strauss, 1993), unsurprisingly, framed how Generation X employees were portrayed. The press narrative began as a laissez-faire redemption from the early 1990s pessimism of Seattle grunge music: "Generation X and stocks, it now seemed, went together like Kurt and Courtney." (Frank, 2002: 139). After inner-city gentrification and the dotcom crash, the pendulum swung back and Gen-Xers were again portrayed as 'detestable' slackers (Brown and Mieszkowski, 2001) who had probably 'overdosed' on cultural theory, postmodernism and media studies (Frank, 2002: 297). Over a decade they had changed from Slackers to Net.Media Moguls to New Slackers—a cyclical pattern that also embodied the rise-and-fall of Geek Chic (Katz, 2000; Katz, 2001; Shulgan, 2001). Underlying this narrative was an inter-generational battle over financial independence (Frank, 2002: 161), an object relations-style pattern of rejection, and a stratification of social hierarchies (Sulloway, 1996; Lessard and Baldwin, 2000a; Lessard and Baldwin, 2000b). Having rejected Generation X, many Baby Boomer analysts are now studying the Millennials and honing their Short Messaging Service skills (Howe and Strauss, 2001; Kuo, 2001: 205).

The Siren Call of Normative Scenarios

The inter-generational niche-space also shaped The Long Boom (Schwartz, Leyden and Hyatt, 2000), an influential Global Business Network scenario that projected the success of Hayek's market capitalism, the growth of biotechnology and nanotechnology, and the Nietzschean overcoming of the Club of Rome's global problematique. This optimistic projection was shared by Wired Magazine (Cassidy, 2002: 45). When the NASDAQ crash intervened and short-circuited GBN's forecast (Schwartz, 2001), the team simply offered three new trajectories. Schwartz did not address the observation that techno-utopian thinking would flourish between 1989 and 2011 due to macro-economic shifts (Cassidy, 2002: 314). Schwartz also failed to explore, in his scenario's analysis of the 1980-2000 historical phase the probability that CNN's Persian Gulf War coverage, the Military-Nintendo Complex, and the early 1990s domestic recession had created both the public interest in dotcoms and the college-educated labor pool for a new industry.

Michael Lewis's portrait of Netscape Communications and Healtheon founder Jim Clark also shared GBN's techno-utopian bias (Cassidy, 2002: 204). Criticized for hero-worship of venture capitalists, The New New Thing (1999) contended that Clark had 'jump-started' the dotcom boom for personal reasons. After Clark visited the luxury yacht Juliet on San Francisco Bay, he decided to build his own (Hyperion) and needed the money. "Clark's first sighting of Juliet was one of those small perturbations," Lewis argued, "that radically altered the world we inhabit." (Lewis, 1999: 410). Few other scenarios dared to explicitly consider how irrational human decisions had shaped new futures. Clark, along with Frank Quattrone and TheStreet.com founder Stuart Cramer, embodied how Hayek's market capitalism had fused with Wall Street's trader psychology (Frank, 2002: 130) to spawn the 'day-trading' culture (Cassidy, 2002: 225). Lewis's book also signified the replacement of effective organizational management by shallow public relations (Frank, 2002: 224).

The normative power of these scenarios in shaping the dotcom future was offset by several critical perspectives. Richard Barbrook's scathing critique of the California Ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996) 'surfaced' how early Wired Magazine flourished in a post-Reaganomics climate and 'Vietnam Syndrome' recovery (Cassidy, 2002: 101, 195). Edward Luttwak's disavowal of the Washington Consensus (Luttwak, 1999; Frank, 2002: 16) and Paul Krugman's critique of pop macro-economics (Krugman, 1996) highlighted how comparisons of the US 'New Economy' versus Britain and Japan (Frank, 2002: 7; Cassidy, 2002: 171) had misinterpreted global financial flows for propagandistic ends. In a penetrating analysis, Geert Lovink has showed that CEO worship, a myopic press and uncritical scenarios contributed to the collapse of Enron and Worldcom (Lovink, 2002).

Many consultants still considered scenario-planning to be foresight's "killer app." This view was shared by the traditional management consultancies (O'Shea and Madigan, 1998; Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 1996). Yet their self-proclaimed evolutionary successors failed to make allowances for human fallibility and flawed mental constructs (Soros, Wien and Koenen: 1996: 210; Weick, 1999) that exemplified the best scenarios. Poor research skills contributed to flawed NASDAQ reports and forward-looking scenarios (Cassidy, 2002: 280, 283) before the press focused on "Chinese walls" and insider-trading rackets.

'Colonizing The Past'

Dotcom entrepreneurs also attempted to 'colonize the past' as self-justification for their decisions. The rise of the "Movie Brats" generation and the 1970s New Hollywood was often invoked as an historical parallel (Frank, 2002: 278) that explained current scenarios of industry growth. On the surface this was a plausible explanation: the growth of the New York's Silicon Alley and Los Angeles industry clusters mirrored the earlier role of the cities' film schools, the October 1968 repeal of the Production Code was refracted through 401-k investments and deregulated mutual funds (Cassidy, 2002: 31), the Vietnam War was exchanged for the second Persian Gulf War, and the bankruptcy of major studios became the collapse of media conglomerates. Finally, the rise of independent producers and auteurist directors evolved into the maverick Web editor and Content producer whose artistic visions transcended the limits of old media.