Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - How the 00s changed the tech world forever

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

The 2000s were a formative decade for tech. From the dot com bubble to the rise of social media, to the chaotic days of early blogging, the iMac, and emergence of the PayPal Mafia, the 00s shaped our online world in ways we’re still reckoning with.Colette Shade is the author of the brand new bestselling book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was). Today she joins Taylor to unpack the lasting impact of the 00s on our tech landscape. Colette gives a nostalgic but critical account of the decade that set the stage for the digital revolution. She discusses what we can learn from the golden age of dial-up internet and tech optimism, and how the aughts ultimately set the stage for today’s hyper-surveilled, algorithm-driven world. SUBSCRIBE TO POWER USER ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/taylorlorenz 

The way that these businesses are structured are consolidating power into a very small number of people's hands. And on top of that, those people have some really freaky and scary ideas about science and race and politics. The 2000s were the petri dish for the digital world we live in today. It was an era of whiplash-inducing change. When the internet transformed from a niche playground for tech geeks to the foundation of modern life, The decade began with the implosion of the dot-com bubble, sending Silicon Valley into an existential crisis only for it to reemerge more powerful.

Platforms like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook rewired how people socialized and laid the groundwork for influencer culture and virality. Meanwhile, the launch of the iPhone in 2007 put the internet in everyone's pocket for the first time. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device. And we are calling it iPhone. The 2000s,

were also the decade that minted some of the most powerful people in tech today. From Mark Andresen to Peter Thiel to Jeff Bezos, this wave of founders went on to shape tech for decades. The Y2K era was a blueprint for so much of what came after it. Here to discuss how the 2000s shaped tech and internet culture and what we can learn from that decade is Colette Shade, the author of Y2K, How the 2000s Became Everything. Colette, welcome to Power User. Hi, thanks for having me, Taylor. Okay, so I want you to take us back to right before the year 2000, right before the kind of Y2K panic. What was the tech landscape like back in the late 90s?

So the first dot-com IPO happened in 1995 and the entire tech landscape was heating up for the first time ever. There was tons of money pouring into the dot-com sector and people were getting rich left and right. And it was just very optimistic about this brand new technology called the internet. We excerpted actually one of your essays from the book Empower User. That was one of my favorite things you wrote about a personal experience that you had kind of with the dot com bubble. Your uncle worked in the startup ecosystem, right? Can you talk about what it was like for the people that sort of got rich off the dot com boom? Yeah. So my uncle was coming out of management.

He was like an upper middle class guy in management at a more traditional tech company at Intel. And then he, in the mid-90s, went into startup investing. He was involved in a company. And overnight, it got purchased by Nokia, which at the time was a blue chip company. I mean, it was written about in the New York Times. It was this huge moment in his life and in kind of our family story. Yeah, I feel like there were just all of these stories, especially in the media back then in the late 90s, about people striking it rich through the dot com bubble. Now we know of it as a bubble, I guess. And it seemed like it was the first time where people really started to realize that there was a lot of economic possibility on the internet where this is a place where money can be made and there's opportunities. It's not just like a weird place where people are posting, you know, from their bedrooms. No, exactly. When the internet, when the World Wide Web, rather, first went live in.

1991 with one website, there was this idea that it was this funny toy. And as things went by 92, 93, 94, things, there were more websites. People were chatting in chat rooms. There were forums. People were sending emails. But the idea that you, that this was a place where you could make a lot of money didn't come into play until the Netscape IPO in 1995. Can you talk about the impact of that boom. And what do you think that that dot-com sort of gold rush did to our perception of technology and the internet? It provided a lot of legitimacy for the internet as a technology, first of all.

But the Netscape IPO was really important because it created Mark Andreessen. That was where he, if you've seen him on Twitter posting his various thoughts and theories, that's where he first struck it rich. And there's this narrative around Andresen and people like him of the young, scrappy, hungry entrepreneur who creates something, who bootstraps something or creates it in his garage and then strikes it rich overnight. And it's kind of a meritocratic story because the heroes of these narratives are always depicted as these nerds who don't really care about money. They just care about the technology and maybe even making the world a better place. But I feel like soon money rushed in and these VCs started funding these dot com era businesses. I mean, Pets.com is the one that seems like most emblematic of this era.

And you wrote about it, right, with this like crazy ad campaign. So Pets.com is held up as the cautionary tale of dot com excess because it had a lot of money poured into it. Actually, a good amount of money was poured into it by Jeff Bezos. He was a major investor. I think he had at one point a 50 or 51% share. And it was a company that sold direct-to-consumer pet food and pet products, which wasn't a bad idea on its face. It's just that the distribution infrastructure didn't exist yet.

There's this idea that the dot-com sector would expand exponentially. So Pets.com splashed out on this very expensive Super Bowl ad campaign where they paid Michael E. in black to play their mascot who was a talking dog sock puppet. Also that a couple months earlier during the 1999 Macy's Day parade, they spent a lot of money on a flow in the parade to promote their company. The idea being that this is the same as any other blue chip company that had enough revenue coming in and would for the foreseeable future that such things were of reasonable expenditures. And I feel like this hype of the sort of late 90s turn of the millennium.com,

you know, excess died very quickly. I think the first time that I remember, I guess, feeling like nervous about the internet was around actual Y2K, like the year 2000 and the terror around that. There was a lot of fear about, you know, the network going down or, you know, all these things we relied on the internet for even back then, it being taken away suddenly and having this sort of global nefarious impact. Can you talk about actual Y2K and what happened around it? Basically, there was this worried that computers were programmed using the dates of the 20th century, so 19XX. And then as soon as we hit 2000, somehow the computers would think it was all 1900 again and would shut down. And my understanding, the world would end.

The world would end. Yeah. And my understanding is that there was a good amount of prep that was done to mitigate this. Yeah, it never happened the way the world did not end. So right as this Y2K panic is happening and people were starting to kind of, I think, consider the impact that the internet was having on their lives and on these infrastructure that we all rely on, you started to see the dot-com bubble burst. And it really started to burst right around the turn of the millennium in the year 2000. How did it? that bubble burst and what were the after effects? The bubble began to burst in March 2000, and it took until 2002 for a lot of that wealth to be fully wiped out. Of course, not all of that wealth was wiped out. And for some people, in fact, many of our biggest and most powerful billionaires, that bubble gave them their first step that allowed them to leapfrog from company to company and venture to venture and amass untold wealth over the next 25 years. But what happened is that for a lot of the people who were involved in the dot-com bubble who say worked for a startup, they got laid off. Another thing that happened was particularly for people

who got stock options of, for example, pets.com, well, that was a worthless stock once the dot com bubble collapsed. Now, if you got stock in a blue chip company, that was worth something, or if you got some other payout. Unfortunately, for a lot of people in the dot com bubble, their wealth came from stock options for stocks that then quickly became worthless. What effect do you think that it had on our perceptions of the internet and the opportunities that it brought? The media around the dot-com bubble painted these really hagiographic portraits of these people who were getting rich. So people like Elon Musk and Dries and I talked about Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, these usually male, usually white, usually very young nerdy men who got rich overnight and deserved it because they

were geniuses. It's this real great man narrative of these single individual people who are usually white men. We also start to see in the early 2000s the emergence of the social web with apps like Friendster and MySpace. And I feel like, I mean, as a kid, we were both kids. I think we're both millennials. Like back then, I wasn't paying attention to the dot-com boom, really. But I definitely was on AIM every night. And I was on a lot of these sort of early social networking.

websites. How was the internet affecting kind of young people and the culture in sort of the broader public? Yeah. So I think the really interesting thing about the millennial cohort is that we grew up as the internet grew up. So I remember the internet coming to my house in 1995 for the first time. I remember getting my first email address. I remember getting my first screen name, Lilalian 2. And I have memories of being like in middle school. six, seventh, eighth grade, going into chat rooms, talking with friends on AIM, doing teen open diary, which is like a proto live journal, and then later in high school of doing MySpace, and then later in college Facebook. And I think that that's really interesting because I was

experiencing each iteration at a formative moment in my life versus just being born into it and having the social web already in existence or being an adult and then watching these changes happen. It really changed how we saw ourselves and how we saw each other. How did it change, you know, how young people started to see each other and the broader sort of social fabric? I think it contributed to the notion that we're all brands and it contributed to a sort of objectification of our own relationships instead of thinking, oh, I have all of these friends. It's, well, how many friends do I have? Which friends are in my

top eight on MySpace? Which friends do I have on Facebook? And how does that compare to the number of friends that other people I know have? Yeah, so it was sort of the origins of this culture of comparison that would end up sort of on steroids, I guess, later in the 2010s. Yeah, I mean, there was always a culture of comparison, but we never had the technology to make. make it this way. It was always just sort of a thing where people would say, oh, I'm really jealous of this popular classmate or something. There was never a way to quantify it or to spend time pouring over other people's photos and images and interactions. You'd basically have to be a stalker to do that prior to the social web. I feel like there was also a lot of emergence of sort of subcultures

and allowing teens, especially to connect through different subcultures. Like with MySpace, there was a bunch of like scene kind of emo kids. And you started to see a lot of people connecting with people that weren't in their immediate geographic area. So it seems like the internet was also like opening up the world and there was so much optimism, right? Yeah, there was this idea in at the turn of the 20th century. I'm sorry, there's this idea at the turn of the 21st century, Y2K or a late,

early 2000s, that the internet would allow us to make connections beyond physical geography. And that actually was true. I knew someone in high school who I went to high school outside Baltimore. And I remember he was talking to me about all of these cool people in bands in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and how he wanted to go to college in New York and hang out in all of these places with these people that he probably wouldn't have known about prior to MySpace and blogs. And so, yeah, I think that that really was a cool thing that the internet offered, that the internet still offers. But yeah, I don't know. That was a cool thing. I feel like there were so many interesting electronics in the era of Y2K in the early

days of the turn of the millennium. Can you describe the aesthetics, the early aesthetics of the technology and gadgets of that time and what those aesthetics kind of tell us about the state of technology from back then. Yeah. So the classic one was the iMac G3, which started in 1998. The first one came out. It was in one color. It was blue and clear and you could see through and see the wires a little bit inside of the computer. Then the next year it came out in four different colors, I believe, four or five different colors in 1999. And this started this trend of having technology that was translucent and colorful. And you could see inside it.

It was really fun. It almost looked like candy that you could eat. It was round and blobby. And this look became popular with Tamagocchi's, which itself was a very much trend of the time. It became popular with. Gameboys, PlayStation controllers, floppy disks, any kind of technology you could find from 1998, 99, 2000, 2001 was copying this look of the iMac G3. And what do you think that that aesthetic sort of tells us about the way people view technology

and the sort of the role that tech was playing in our lives back then? Yeah, well, it was fun. It was colorful. It looked and felt optimistic and futuristic. It didn't look like anything that had ever existed before in real life. It looked like something you would see on the Jetsons or on a spaceship. But also the fact that it was translucent almost seems like it was transmitting the belief that people had about technology, that it would increase transparency.

It would create more trust and honesty and openness within governments, between governments, between governments, and citizens between different citizens and each other. Yeah, that ultimately ended up not working out so much. It's funny. It's the opposite. It was the opposite. This episode of Power User is brought to you by Delete Me. As a high-profile journalist who's dealt with stalking, harassment, and death threats, I know how crucial it is to protect your personal information. Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are, data brokers will collect and sell your personal

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Don't wait until it's too late to safeguard your privacy. Make sure that your data and your families stays protected. You also talk about car design and the re-released VW bug that came out of that era of this little, like, sleek little beetle and compare it to, you know, cars like the cyber truck and what we have today. Why did you choose to write about the VW bug? And what do you think it says about tech? The people who were helming the tech in the late 90s.com bubble were in most cases coming out of the counterculture in San Francisco in the Bay Area in the 1960s. My uncle, for example, he was a Stanford dropout who had experimented with psychedelics and had gone to a lot of Grateful Dead shows and toured with an Americana band around the West Coast. Someone like Steve Jobs also had a somewhat similar trajectory. So there was this idealism that comes from the 60s counterculture about tech and the internet and what it could do.

And I think that that is really summed up in the revival of the Volkswagen Beetle, which was a car that specifically connotes the 60s. But it also has the look of that blobby futuristic Y2K technology. And so it's almost saying, hey, this futuristic world that's going to be brought to us by the internet and the dot-com bubble, this is the full realization of. of the hopes and dreams of the 1960s Bay Area Counterculture. Contrast this to the cyber truck, which comes out 25 years later. Now, that's also a view of the future, but it's sharp, it's hard, the windows are small,

you can't see inside it, and it looks like a military vehicle. So the vision of the future that is put forth by the cyber truck seems to be a future of violence and militarism. It seems really scary compared to this peaceful, sleek, open new beetle. Most of the early aughts were defined by this excitement around tech. Like you mentioned, this sort of belief that it's going to change the world. It's going to make everything better.

It's really exciting. And there's just a lot of optimism, I feel like, in the aughts, in the mid-a-a-a-a-a-tots, not just towards technology, but towards everything. It's like this exciting time of opportunity. And then the 2008 financial. crisis hits. And what happens next? 2008 inaugurated this era of really bad vibes. It really killed the optimism because it completely changed what people's opportunities and everyday life was like. And so I think there is a lot of

searching for other kind of cultural forms and cultural affects that were different. than what was happening in the Y2K era from 1997 through 2008. Now, the interesting thing with tech is that you had the second tech boom that was during the early 2010s as well as the rise of digital media. I feel like that was birth kind of out of the 2008 crisis. Yes. Yes, it was. Yeah.

And a big thing that made that possible is the low interest rates that allowed for this growth. and there was this sense among people who allied themselves with Obama that tech was part of this progressive future that we could maybe still have even in the wake of the Great Recession. But what happened recently, I think, is that the people have really been souring on it. Yeah, to put it lightly, I feel like, I feel like by the end of the 2010s, really with Trump's election, you started to see the beginning of the tech lash and the beginning of like people realizing, oh, wait a minute, maybe Facebook isn't all sort of sunshine and rainbows. It's not our friend. Like, I think people realize that these technologies themselves have dark sides, but also they started

to see that the way that these businesses are structured are monopolistic and are consolidating power into a very small number of people's hands. And on top of that, those people have some really freaky and scary ideas about science and race and politics. When you look back at the aughts and just writing this book and you look at the tech landscape today, I mean, I feel like technology is such a core theme of that era and of the experience of the aughts. What lessons do you think we can learn? Like, why is it so important to reexamine this period of history when all of these technologies

and figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, et cetera, were emerging? Well, I think the media, for one, just didn't go hard enough on these people and didn't really dig into the ways that these technologies could have downsides or the ways that these people getting very, very rich, very, very fast could create a dangerous political situation. And I would like to see more credulity from people going forward, particularly from the media or what's left of it about these things, about new technology and about rich people in general. Although it's funny to reexamine some of the media that was written about that time because I would argue that there is actually a lot of negative coverage and moral panic. It's just, it reminds me, frankly, of the coverage today, which is really misplaced, where it's a lot of moral panic around kids are spending too much time on the internet or, you know,

they're chatting with their friends on MySpace. And that means they're going to get a ducted. Never mind that was, you know, you're most likely to get abducted by someone you know. This was like a completely overblown sort of panic. And there wasn't a focus on, like you said, the actual founders behind these technologies and where their money was coming from and going. And what ideologies they kind of held close. So I feel like it's important to not just have critical coverage, but to aim that criticism in the right place. Like so much criticism gets levied on sort of like it again pushing this moral panic around kids in tech and we did have some of that right in that era but not enough on yeah these powerful founders and the companies themselves

and their business models right i mean i'm not an anti-tech person necessarily i just think the problem is how the ownership is structured and the fact that people are very small numbers of people are able to accrue unprecedented levels of power, which inevitably has social consequences. It has consequences for democracy. There's such a resurgence of Y2K aesthetics, especially in recent years with TikTok and I saw blow up furniture recently being advertised on Wayfair, which is funny.

I maybe think of you. But there's also just like, you know, I feel like the McBling aesthetic is back. That's coming back. Silver eye shadow. Like there's so much nostalgia for that era and especially from young people sort of seeking to recreate the aesthetics of it. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think that there's something really fun and hopeful about it. And I think that we live in a really scary time, obviously, politically, ecologically, economically, technologically. And I think when we look at the Y2K aesthetic, it gives us a vision of a utopian. future, not a dystopian future. And so I can't blame anyone, whether they're Gen Z or Alpha or their our age or even people who are older than us for wanting to go back to that and relive it through the trends. What do you think we can learn from looking back on that time? I mean, obviously, the media coverage could have been better, but what lessons do you take from that era and

reexamining, you know, the events of the odds? This is maybe a meta answer, but we need to recognize that we live in history and that we were not special and we are part of a historical story that's much bigger and longer than our lives. And if we want to create a better world going forward, we need to not disregard the lessons of the past. Reading your book, it's such a time warp and it's so good because it really takes you back no matter what age you were sort of to this era. and I feel like it helped kind of almost close a chapter and like contextualize the world and look back at it and kind of like be able to like move on. I feel like it gave me like closure from the Y2Ks in a way that like it was sort of like hard to do previously. Maybe it's also just the fact that it's like 15 years out now from 2010.

Did writing the book give you any closure or sort of like help tie a bow on that era in any way? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. the whole project of writing this book was closure, I think. It was trying to make sense of my own life, first and foremost, and how my own life fit into a historical story that's bigger than myself. But it was also me making sense of an era, because I hadn't seen anyone do that yet to my satisfaction. Like, I really intended Y2K to be a decades book, like Chuck Klosterman's book, the 90s, or like David Halberstam's, famous book, The 50s. I want my book to be a cornerstone that people think about when they make

sense of that time. So it makes me happy, Taylor, that you and seemingly others have taken that meaning making from it. It's so good. Well, highly recommend it. Thank you so much, Colette, for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Delete Me for sponsoring this episode of Power User. To help get your data removed from the internet, check out Delete me via the link in the description, and use code Taylor 20 at checkout for 20% off consumer plans. All right, that's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel. That's at Taylor Lorenz.

If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter called User Magazine. It's at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. That's it for now, and we'll see you next week.