The dot.com crash was caused by nervous-system strain from information overload

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 inversion - crash as neurological overload rather than economic cause - is worth investigating seriously.
• XREF: Connects to earlier reading on silence and information overload structurally undermining independent thought. — connects to: Informational overload caused the dot.com crash, not the reverse — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 452; The dot-com crash stemmed from advertisers’ inability to prove online ads worked — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 891; Unmanageable information flows produce a pathological collective panic — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1496 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Informational overload caused the dot.com crash, not the reverse #corroborates (1.00) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 452
• The 2000 dot-com crash abruptly ended Google’s fundraising confidence #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 223
• The dot-com crash stemmed from advertisers’ inability to prove online ads worked #contradicts (0.70) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 891
• Unmanageable information flows produce a pathological collective panic #expands (0.70) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1496
• Web 2.0 revived tech optimism after the dot-com crash dismantled it #expands (0.70) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 54
• Information overload persists because it serves commercial interests, though unplanned #responds-to (0.70) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 451
• Information overload reflects an excess of healthy curiosity #contradicts (0.70) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 542