One aspect of these retrospectives of the dot-com boom era, is the mistaken idea that everyone at the time was unquestioningly swept along with the hype. Here i

One aspect of these retrospectives of the dot-com boom era, is the mistaken idea that everyone at the time was unquestioningly swept along with the hype. Here in Sweden, while the newspapers were full of proudly patriotic articles about how boo.com was part of a new paradigm of internet-based economies that somehow didn't need to be 'profitable' in some ill-defined 'old-fashioned' sense, pretty much all the serious developers that I worked with were wondrous and mocking of the hype and the ridiculously shaky technology that underwrote it. At the same time, massive central buildings in the most expensive parts of Stockholm were being luxuriously renovated to provide multinational 'tech' companies with a base for their over-inflated staff: friends of mine were employed at one of them, and within a couple of months most of their friends and their girlfriends, and their girlfriend's friends were also working there, holding work-titles that had little relation to any business-case that we or even they could understand. Whenever I visited to hang out in the enormous purpose-built cinema or in one of the crazily and expensively fitted meditation or creation rooms, I was always amused by the enormous bowl of luxurious fruit in the lobby - always topped by a pineapple. The small detail seemed to symbolize the absurdity of the whole show: who was the pineapple meant for? Which member of staff or visitor was supposed to pick up this pineapple on the way through the lobby? Usually it stayed there the whole week, to be replaced the week after by another fresh pineapple, and so on until the bust.