Will he or won't he apologie? from the Sunday New York Times Magazine, September 2001 --

?

In the wake of the dot-com collapse, fortunes have been lost, and companies have evaporated. But the biggest disruptions in Silicon Valley are not financial, but personal, as the men and women who inflated the Internet bubble now survey its ruins and try to make sense of what's happened to their lives.

Over the last few months, I've talked to hundreds of people who have lost their high-tech jobs, many of whom I knew and wrote about on their way up. I've been struck, over and over, by how *stuck* everyone seems, how unable to process the magnitude of what has changed out here. The lessons people are drawing seem oddly shallow: "I should have gone into wireless," they say; or, "Next time I'll question the business plan." (I never know how to tell them that there isn't going to be a next time, not for a long while.) Others have gone limp, giving up on the idea of work they can be passionate about and retreating into early-90s slacker mode. Many bear a grudge against those who, they think, benefitted at their expense.

Recently, a few big players have stepped forward to offer their *mea culpa.* The influential cyber-thinker John Perry Barlow emailed 890 of his friends in June to say that he felt some "miniscule" responsibility for the Dot Bust, having failed to criticize the folly of companies built on nothing more than inflated market values. In August, the Valley's highest-profile venture capitalist, John Doerr, apologized for making his oft-repeated proclamation, "The internet is the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet." By hyping wealth rather than invention, he confessed, he had distracted the industry from its role of incubating revolutionary technology.