Informational overload caused the dot.com crash, not the reverse

Evidence

I’m reminded of Franco Berardi’s arguments about the relationship between informational overload and depression. Berardi’s argument is not that the dot.com crash caused depression, but the reverse: the crash was caused by the excessive strain put on people’s nervous systems by new informational technologies. Now, more than a decade after the dot.com crash and the density of data has massively increased. The paradigmatic labourer is now the call centre worker – the banal cyborg, punished whenever they unplug from the communicative matrix. On North, James Buttery, afflicted by all manner of digital palsies, sounds like a cyborg whose implants and interfaces have come loose, learning to be a man again, and not liking it very much. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 452

Categorization

• QUESTION: Berardi’s causal claim is striking but hard to verify empirically — worth chasing the original argument.
• XREF: connects to: Media acceleration is a convention of time-equals-money, not necessity — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 420; The dot-com crash wiped out startups and investor confidence within months — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 224; The 2000 dot-com crash abruptly ended Google’s fundraising confidence — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 223 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The dot-com crash wiped out startups and investor confidence within months #contradicts (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 224
• The 2000 dot-com crash abruptly ended Google’s fundraising confidence #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 223