The dot-com crash restructured rather than ended San Francisco’s tech scene.

Evidence

In San Francisco proper, the dot-com crash had a devastating effect. The Bay Area lost 450,000 jobs in the bust, the equivalent of the entire working population of today’s San Francisco. Nationwide, the economic crash put a damper on techno-utopianism and prematurely dulled the enthusiasm surrounding the internet; John Cassidy, a financial writer for the New Yorker, wrote in his book dot.con that the internet “was not a ‘disruptive technology’ … bookstores, newspaper companies, and brokerage houses are still in business, and most of them are doing fine.” Despite this dismissal, many survivors of the dot-com era, made wealthy by Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, and Netscape, founded or invested in Web 2.0 companies. Furthermore, entrepreneurs who bucked conventional wisdom and started internet companies in the post-bust era—Wikipedia in 2001, Friendster in 2002, MySpace and LinkedIn in 2003, and Flickr and Digg in 2004—became some of the stars of the Web 2.0 boom. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 145

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Web 2.0 revived tech optimism after the dot-com crash dismantled it — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 54; The Beat scene relocated from San Francisco to lower Manhattan by 1960 — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 162

Broader Connections

• Web 2.0 revived tech optimism after the dot-com crash dismantled it #contradicts (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 54
• The Beat scene relocated from San Francisco to lower Manhattan by 1960 #qualifies (0.72) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 162