The day the music died

10 years ago, on this Friday in March of 2000, the Dot.Com bubble burst in the UK.

Ok, maybe not precisely today - when a speculation bubble bursts isn't a singular quantum event but, for me, that was the day it all started going Pete Tong as we call it in the sceptered isle.

The reason why I can fix it to such a particular date is NTK. Specifically this item, reproduced in their trademark 72 monospaced character style

Tip to Lastminute: the trick with these flotations is to
give a chance for your original investors to sell out before      
the hoi-polloi take a look at the long-term prospects, then         
run out of the market screaming. Indeed, the biggest problem        
with lastminute's punt was that just how obviously they were     
putting the boat out too early (obvious, except for maybe         
hacks blinded by the instant human interest appeal of Martha         
Lane Fox). For one thing, it was painted all over the         
prospectus. As NTK subscriber Alex Balfour writes: "from the         
prospectus details, and my calculations, at a minimal budget         
of 5.5 million, Lastminute needs to make around 403,500         
sales a year to make ends meet. Judging by their current
subscriber/purchase ratio, that requires 207,000 paying      
users - or 15.8 million subscribers overall. If they carry     
on spending 25 million a year, they need to sell 2 million items.   
Which requires 78 million subscribers - or more than the         
entire population of the UK." Actually, we're not too         
worried about Lastminute surviving: but it's hardly the         
ideal poster child for the British Net boom. And what makes         
that scary is that it's the only UK floated Website that         
we remember any of us actually *visiting*.

- NTK, March 17th, 2000

NTK (short for Need To Know) was a somehow quintessentially British weekly mail out consisting of unpredicatably unequal parts of canny insight, news, rumours, happenings, reviews and snark. Lots of snark. Started by two ex Wired UK writers - Danny O'Brien (now the EFF's International Outreach CoordinatorInternet advocacy coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists ) and Dave Green (who appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth - rumours are that he sublimed into some sort of pop culture based subspace, possibly as a precursor to immanentizing a snack based eschaton) it was, in its own words an

"interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent."

I remember very clearly reading the issue that Friday and thinking "This is it, the jig's up, it's all downhill from here". That month the NASDAQ peaked and started its vertiginous descent and within two months Boo.com went bust having burnt through £125 million in funding. Shortly afterwards I'd finished my finals at University, jacked in my job and was backpacking round South East Asia wondering how the hell I'd managed to already get burnt out in my (very) early 20s.

The Dot.Com scene in London was very different from the one in San Francisco not least because instead of starting new business 'paradigms' it was mostly Digital Agencies doing site design and advertising and "digital strategies" for existing Bricks and Mortars companies. In 1998, still in College, I'd started work for a vanishingly small company doing promotional games and websites and had been terrified of being uncovered as a fraud until, quite quickly, I realised that everyone was blagging it. None of us knew, really, what were doing. In fact, and I may be projecting here, largely we were waiting for the other shoe to drop - for that moment when the adults came in and took all our toys away but, until that moment came we should blow as much of this ridiculous amounts of money that people just keep throwing at us on razor scooters, and vintage Defender cabs and giant parties at The Old Truman Brewery

I don't think anybody looked good in those trousers

It wasn't until a second wave of people, attracted by all the media hype, turned up that I think things really started to go tits up and comatose. These people, and the credulous and grasping press that fueled them, genuinely thought that this time it was all going to be different and that this was a world changing paradigm and not because the internet was a breathtakingly fabulous medium for communication and collaboration and free speech, but because it meant business somehow didn't have to make money any more and that the rag tag bunch of nerds, geeks and dorks who were stringing everything together with hooky copies of Photoshop and Fireworks and spit and unholy brews of PHP and Perl and shell scripts were all going to magically transform into neoprene clad cast of "Hackers"

In the future we'll all look like Matthew Lillard and wear wetsuits all the time

I remember shortly before the crash I was in an issue of Cre@te, the breathtakingly over designed "web" magazine from the same publishers of the similarly styled Edge magazine. A reader had taken objection to something I'd said and responded along the lines of

"Simon Wistow is part of the old generation of the internet and doesn't understand where the web is heading - he's too old to realise that the web is wasted on text"

I was 22 at the time.

In a way it was all reminiscent of this paragraph from Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"

"It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist-it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements-and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels"

except without the flannel shirts. Mostly.

Seriously, people did look like this

The layoffs came with a vengeance in 2001 - every Friday seemed to herald more news about friends being let go. It was usually in phases as if the blood letting could somehow delay the inevitable. Each round bought the odd sensation of not wanting to be unemployed and yet also wanting to be one of the first when the redundancy payouts were at their highest.

Several times in the past, usually whilst drunk, I've urged Danny and Dave to write some sort of history of the time period and the stuff that came out of it - in the lean times that followed some truly fantastic stuff emerged like DorkBot and Strange Attractor and FaxYourMP and NotCon and ORG and the work that the various refugees who sheltered at the BBC and the Guardian did which drove forward online news in the UK by leaps and bounds.

I recently got hold of a copy of the paper Newspaper Club's did a run of 500 1000 of for SxSW

It's like a blog ... in paper form!

and it pleases me that it's the same people from way back then doing actual tangible, physical things. Although perhaps that's a byproduct of me waxing nostalgic.

Further reading

• The adventures of Nathan Barley (very NSFW)
• Danny's account of the rise and fall of Wired UK
• Yoz Grahame's fantastical account of working at Douglas Adam's Digital Village on the H2G2 site

Comments

[Rod Begbie]

[this is good] I just signed in to Vox for the first time in ages, just to give this a [this is good]

Nice one.

[Rod Begbie]

BTW, relating to Danny, layoffs, and boo.com, I love his recap from the dreadful uk-nm list: http://chinwag.com/lists/uk-netmarketing/old-archive/archive-may-2000/msg00255.shtml

[Paul Mison]

[this is good]

[thegareth]

[this is good] The happy days of wandering Upper St bitching about the new-media wankers without any sense of irony of what we were.

[dob]

[this is good] You know, if I could remember

[holgate]

[this is good] We'd all be happy to jog your memory, Danny.

From my semi-connected perspective, London was always better set up to keep talent during the bust, and not just because the Beeb and Graun and a few other places paid people to do clever stuff while the U-Hauls were busy shipping people's lives away from NoCal. The solidification of that sense of winging it into a way of getting stuff done combined well with the relative difficulty of living a sleep-under-your-desk startup life. If build-to-flip wasn't going to happen, you might as well build things you could be proud of.

I was in another part of the US when Lastminute floated and the NASDAQ sank.  At the start of 2001, I went to SF for the first (and to date, only) time, and it had the atmosphere of a Yorkshire pit villlage in the 80s.

[Dan Hon]

[this is good]

[drhyde]

[c’est top] It was a great Defender cabinet :-)

[Ian Betteridge]

[this is good] The party where I managed to persuade a Japanese film crew (come to film swinging new media London) that Chris Locke was Richard Branson was rather fun.