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Comeuppance: Getting in Touch with their Soulessness on Silicon Alley

[ By David Hollander ]

Grim news: New York technology stocks have plunged 53% since peaking in March. . . . 5,000 lay-offs in Manhattan technology companies since September. It’s payback time in Silicon Alley and I’m loving it. Not because I’m against the "new economy" or because I’m a pent up Luddite or anything like that. It’s because I’ve grown so sick of watching the ubiquitous swarm of snotty little dot-com kids who, for the last two years, have taken every restaurant reservation, every apartment, miles of office space and every inch of bar space in this city while contributing nothing in return except obnoxious pretense.

My case in point was illustrated perfectly in a New York Times article (10/27/00, B1) written by Charles LeDuff profiling a recently terminated Psuedo.com employee; 30-year old former art director Steve Fine — one the most unsympathetic characters you’ll ever come across. Reading the article, one could almost hear the Times columnist giggling in front of his monitor, writing a story he could have easily entitled "Portrait of a Dot-Com Asshole."

"We were making art, we thought." said a high-minded Mr. Fine. "And we were escaping the middle class." For Mr. Fine and his coworkers this meant spending the entire workday at Pseudo.com doing nothing much more than smoke weed, horse cocaine and download porn while running though $18 million dollars in investment capital — other people’s money. They produced nothing. When investors finally demanded to see some results, a put upon Mr. Fine complained, "The parties faded away and the regular work world took over. In a way it’s a relief I don’t work their any more." I got a news flash for you Steve: You never worked there. When folks require you to actually do something for a paycheck…son, that’s called a job. A job means you have to work. If you don’t want to work then don’t get a job. In fact Steve, artists do "work" on their art. Real artists in this city put in long hours, a lot of sweat and tremendous personal sacrifice — often with little or no recognition and/or pay — in order to pursue their creative vision. The end result of that process is that the world receives a pure creation and the artist keeps his personal integrity in tact. The legacy left from Mr. Fine’s process and that of many other dot-com charlatans has been an excess of sound and fury signifying nothing, plus a month’s worth of headlines on F@ckedCompany.com.

But I’m not just talking about a guy named Steve Fine. His delusion of being some kind of artist when in reality he was nothing more than a lazy con-artist is the prevailing consciousness among the entire Silicon Alley cocktail crowd. As the marketplace now finds precious little wheat amidst copious Silicon Alley chaff, the plain truth has been revealed: Indolence in the service of avarice has sadly been the predominant dot-com raison d’etre. It’s an ethically bankrupt attitude that’s led to financial disaster. What’s so galling is that they’ve pranced around New York City believing their own bullshit -- believing that they’re truly the vanguard, creating revolutionary business models. News flash for the would-be princes of Silicon Alley: "Get rich quick" is a business model that’s been around for quite some time. Steve Fine remembered how the "Wall Street suits" would get high with him at night and then write him a check in the morning. "We ate from the trough of the venture capitalist pigs." Such condescension. Yet if you’ve worked for some of these dot-coms like I have, all you hear all day over the pounding of keyboards is constant talk of IPO’s, stock options, buyouts and vesting periods . So you tell me, where do we find the fattest sows in Manhattan hungrily lapping up capitalist slop? At the end of the day (that’s a popular phrase tossed around on Wall Street these days), the dot-com sheep are simply Wall Street wolves draped in Banana Republic clothing. Now fittingly, the two march hand-in-hand into the NASDAQ abyss.

Back to our hero Steve Fine. "It’s over." he concedes. "Now I’m crawling back to the corporate dog bowl." That right Steve. Go like the dog that you and your colleagues are. Go rub your nose in the feces you’ve laid all over this city. And though many of us cheer the reckoning that has descended upon Silicon Alley, we are not without compassion. Apropos of everything, you and yours may wish to consider some wisdom offered to the fallen Bud Fox in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street as his father dropped him off at the courthouse for sentencing: "It’s gonna be hard on you that’s for sure. Maybe in some screwed up way it’s the best thing that ever could have happened. Stop going for the easy buck and produce something with your life. Create instead of living off the buying and selling of others." In this city, that’s what real artists do.