Dotcom language became the key stratagem to masking these problems. Terms—"broadband," "burn-rate," "exit strategy," "network externalities," "viral marketing"—became strategic planning substitutes for in-depth synthesis, a reality-defining language that short-circuited critical awareness by mis-mapping the territory (Porter, 2001: 73).Verbal thinking overwhelmed non-semantic warning signals (Pearce, 1974: 149). The business press failed to critically analyse this cognitive error. Ironically its best analysts were engaged in a dispute about the applicability of Michael Porter's industrial economics (Mintzberg, Ahlstand and Lampel, 1998: 83; Porter 1980; Porter 1985) to new conditions (Tapscott, 2001; Samuelson, 2002).

Dotcom terminology proliferated in business plans. "The metaphors of the new Internet frontier had spawned a hyper-confident, sometimes empty vocabulary," Geoff Lewis observed, "that would make any business plan seem plausible." (Lewis, 2001: 69). Allusions to Dutch Tulipmania and Charles Mackay were also problematic: these metaphors enabled critics to "wrap up the dotcom phenomenon in a tidybox—and cease further analysis." (Lewis, 2001: 69).

Anthropological techniques and neobiological metaphors flourished. Former Pseudo.com executive producer Robert Olinsky contended that "human life [was] creating this organic culture" while TheKnot.com CEO David Liu believed that "human behaviour was going to dictate where the whole business was going to follow." (Kaitt and Weiss, 2001: 267).

Corporate Religions

What actually followed was a surge in god-like CEOs and the emergence of corporate religions. James Surowiecki traces the first to Lee Iacocca's turnaround of Chrysler during the 1980s (Surowiecki, 2002). Neil Stephenson predicted that corporate religions that manipulated language would evolve as 'buffers' for the reflexivity of business ecosystems (Stephenson, 1992: 214-220, 259-260, 369-380). They were a short-term solution to information overload and workplace uncertainty. "A problem of filters," Douglas Rushkoff remarked, "not technological filters, but psychological/moral/ethical filters." (Shenk, 1999: 100). They also provided a conceptual continuity from Dickensian factories to dotcom sweatshops (Frank and Weiland, 1997: 97).

Its most effective exponent was Fast Company (Cassidy, 2002: 173; Frank, 2002: 4). When Tom Peters wrote "The Brand Called You" for the August 1997 issue (Peters, 1997; Frank, 2002: 229), he popularized the post-Taylorist shift to the 'Free Agent Nation' (Frank, 2002: 180, 204), an ideology that dubiously reframed 'down-sizing' as workplace liberation (Frank, 2002: 216, 218; Hamel, 2000). Its variants included Idealab!'s disastrous funding for entrepreneurial start-ups (Frank, 2002: 246) and E*Trade's market socialism (Frank, 2002: 91).

Before he departed General Electric, Jack Welch had been universally hailed as America's greatest corporate leader because he had "mastered the quarterly earnings ritual" demanded by Wall Street (Walker, 2001: 25). The reality was that despite his rebel-rousing image, Welch was "actually a company man who rose up through the ranks," and that his famous decision to end strategic planning "reflected his background as a consummate insider." (Walker, 2001: 24). After convincing his autobiography's publishers to for a $7.5 million advance, Welch was caught having an extra-marital affair with a Harvard Business Review senior editor, but the magazine looked the other way. When Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos attacked efforts to unionize its Seattle-based warehouse, the dotcom press also engaged in self-censorship (Cohn, 2001: 35; Cassidy, 2002: 146; Frank, 2002: 367, 163, 255).

Corporate religions devolved into the pseudo-scientific search for business laws (Koch, 2000) about telecommunications growth and network externalities (Frank, 202: 158, 354). These laws had limited validity: Razorfish's IPO (30 April 1999) generated $4.7 billion in speculative capital, and the resulting hype made it the de-facto standard for Silicon Alley dotcom consultancies. But they were really over-simplifications of systems archetypes (Frank, 2002: 196). They obscured quantitative scientific research, such as Palm and Handspring founder Jeff Hawkin's study of pattern recognition (Butter and Pogue, 2002: 3), that drove the firm's innovation.

Manifest Destiny?

National foresight analysts have questioned why America came to dominate the 'New Economy' culture. The Clinton Administration embraced debate about the 'digital divide' in the mid-1990s and American workers had a high acceptance of new technology (Corteda, 2001: 127-132). Technological innovation and capital flows echoed previous industry cycles, namely 1950s California, 1970s Silicon Alley and the 1980s telecommunications deregulation (Chandler, 2000; Castells, 2000: 60). This created a 'virtuous circle' for early investors (Cassidy, 2002: 297) which was amplified by cluster proximity to existing industries (film/television broadcast for Los Angeles; publishing for New York City).

Fortune Magazine reporter Joe Nocera contended that deregulated commissions (1 May 1975) drove the major investment banks into speculative capital (Smith, 2002). Amongst his factors "facilitating capital mobility," in the US domestic economy, sociologist Manuel Castells listed "the size of the US economy, entrepreneur-ism, individualism, flexibility, multi-ethnicity (culturally) and deregulation and liberalization (economically)." (Castells, 2000: 148; Rothenberg, 2001).

This unique combination of micro-economic conditions and organizational mind-sets enabled US firms to access venture capital more quickly than other countries. While they should not be equated with Manifest Destiny, this combination may serve as a geopolitical template for future policy analysis and implementation.

[This Is Not An] Exit Strategy

"It was mass-delusionary self-gratification. Everybody feeding on everybody."
— Esther Dyson, dotcom author (Kaitt and Weiss, 2001: 300)