Schmoozing As Virtue
He looked desperate.
And drunk. ("They should never give free beer to tech people," my friend remarked. "It just makes them depressed and desperate.") But mostly desperate. Having spotted the company name on the nametag of my friend's SO, the Desperate Financial Tech (his nametag read "Accounts Payable / Recievable Systems") had button-holed him for advice on how to break in there. Not realizing, apparently, that they'd recently suffered several brutal layoff rounds of their own.
(It wasn't the first time that evening that he'd been buttonholed. The first had been about an hour earlier, when an elderly, highly self-assured man addressed him by name -- read off his name-tag -- and opened by asking, "Is NetSetGo net-set-gone?" As though everyone working for them hadn't been hearing that line for a year or more...)
It's been striking me a lot lately that getting off the boat voluntarily before it sinks is something that it's not such a good idea to brag about. At least, not around people who didn't make it off. People don't want to hear it, unless it's a story of fabulous riches that lets them fantasize about things they never really believed they had a right to in the first place. Your parents and theirs probably taught you that you were entitled to certain things as part of a normal life; getting out before your chances of having those things have been destroyed by the fevered fantasies of a bunch of aging post-humanists just reminds the ones who didn't that they got made fools of.
I missed out on most of the excesses of the dotcom bubble. Didn't lose my shirt over worthless stock, because I couldn't afford the (Ziff-Davis) stock options when they were offered and wasn't unwise enough to exercise my options in a later venture. Missed out on the truly crazed deadlines because the companies I worked for never quite drank that particular batch of .startup koolaid. (Never had much tolerance for koolaid, anyway.) Didn't live in a big enough market to be involved in all the sex and drugs and rock and roll... no, wait, that part never happened. Except for the sex. No, wait, I guess that mostly didn't happen either....
(I'm reminded of what a jaded stripper once said in a documentary: "Guys always come in here thinking they're gonna get laid. Well, you're not gonna get laid, but you are gonna get screwed." But I digress.)
So I knew when to jump. Somewhere, I picked up a talent for smelling failure. I predicted the end of WordPerfect when their first Windows version came out. I knew Ziff-Davis was doomed after working in their Cambridge office for a couple of months. And I knew the bubble was going to burst when Kevin Kelly said it wouldn't.
Lately there's been a lot of free beer flowing down techie gullets around here. Sometime back in Summer of '00, a staid tech-industry executives group morphed into something that calls itself "Digital Rochester" and which seems to exist solely to get geeks drunk once a month. (But only mid-week, because the venue could make money other nights serving dinner.) And recently, something called the High Tech Business Council has been doing the same thing, but with more sponsors (none of them "technical") and better, freer booze. (That's "free" as in "free beer", not as in "freedom.")
Both of these shindigs started well after the bubble began to shrink. Maybe it's because we catch on slow out here, sometimes. But I think there's more to it.
These parties seem to me to be driven by a childlike faith in a sort of social version of Metcalfe's law: The more connections you have, the more valuable you are. Knowing people will increase your stock. That seems to be the idea driving a lot of the people I meet at these things. Take this 30-something (looks 20-something) marketing wonk I know. He's been out of work for something over a year, and aggressively looking the whole time. Very aggressively. I don't think I know anyone with a larger list of email addresses, many of which go into a big, group alias, that gets used once or twice a month to send advice on the job search process to a hundred or more people. You can probably guess how much good it does him.
But he, and others, persist. At base, it's really the same intuition that underlies capitalism, and that blew up the .com bubble: The faster something circulates, the more of it there appears to be. The more connections you have, the more quickly you can circulate your... um, stock. Or whatever. And it works for so many things. Nightclub maviens pay people to move around their clubs continuously, to make them look busy. A wise car dealer moves his stock through his showroom to make it seem like he's selling more product. And during the '90s (like the '80s before them, and the '60s before them, and the '20s before them, and the...), the money moved so fast that it seemed like there was more of it all the time. The illusion got so real, that hard-bitten financial guys even made a grab for the koolaid cup.
It's all an illusion, though. And though impresive things have been built on a foundation of mutually-held illusion, it will always still be an illusion.
Kind of like human society. But that's another story.
