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By Karen Breslau
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When Jason Ward returned to northern California in 1997 after college, he hated how his home-town of Portola Valley had changed. The redwood foot-hills of his childhood had become a playground for the dot-com set. Patrons at his favorite biker bar were jabbering on mobile phones, tapping on their laptops and boasting about their stock options. Spandex-clad yuppies swarmed country roads on their titanium racing bikes, and young Internet moguls thought nothing of banging on his neighbors' doors to offer insane amounts of cash for houses that weren't even for sale. So Ward retaliated as only a self-respecting rebel would: he produced an indie film, "I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley."
Judging from the mood in the San Francisco Bay Area these days, Ward isn't the only one. After years of nearly insufferable hype, the self-proclaimed capital of the New Economy is getting a bracing taste of the downside. From crashing stock prices to dot-com bankruptcies, the Internet titans seem suddenly vulnerable. The Wall Street Journal published a front-page box score of the "90 percent club," featuring the names of dot-com billionaires whose paper fortunes have plummeted 90 percent or more from their market highs. San Francisco and New York host "pink slip" parties to help those who've been laid off find job leads. And many people who felt left out of the boom seem to be enjoying the bust--immensely. "I feel this indescribable joy when I hear one of these companies has run out of money," says Richard Marquez, a San Francisco social worker. "These people haven't made anything better, as far as I'm concerned."
The Germans have a word for this human impulse to take pleasure in the misfortune of others: Schadenfreude. People who never saw a stock option or lunched with a venture capitalist might call it justice. "At some level we didn't think 24-year-olds should have those kind of bank accounts. Not that much, not that soon," says University of Virginia philosopher John Portmann, whose new book, "When Bad Things Happen to Other People," examines the phenomenon of Schadenfreude. "Seeing rich, arrogant people brought down to earth is for many deeply satisfying."
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But today's Schadenfreude reveals more than envy; it reflects deep, middle-class fears--of being priced out of a world run by apple-cheeked billionaires who conduct board meetings from their beanbag chairs; of becoming obsolete in an era of dizzying technological change. To be sure, middle-class Americans rode the high-tech boom for all it was worth, from swelling 401(k)s to a mobile phone and a Pilot in every palm. But as markets cool and the newness of the Internet fades, there seems to be a widespread, if still unspoken, relief that the scoffed-at Old Economy--the one that shaped most people's values and expectations--still exists after all. There's a sense that the beneficiaries of the boom were cheating, says Steven Reiss, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied human jealousy. "People want their traditional values restored and to see the people who challenged them punished."
It doesn't take a German speaker to detect the Schadenfreude that has settled on the famously optimistic Valley. The signs are literally on the wall. A giant outdoor billboard for Limn, a trendy furniture studio in the heart of San Francisco's multimedia gulch, features big red X's through the "www" and the ".com" of the company's Web address. "Step back into the real world," it reads. "The whole Web-site thing was getting ridiculous," says Limn owner Dan Friedlander, who temporarily took his site offline. "People would call in, annoyed because they couldn't get some little bit of information online, and I'd say 'Where are you?' thinking they were in another city. It turns out they were five blocks away. So I'd say, 'Why don't you come in and touch and feel?' And they'd say 'I'm too busy'."
Nationwide, people are delighting in just about anything that inhibits flagrant exhibitions of dot-com wealth. Station wagons are hip again, says Marian Salzman, president of Young & Rubicam's Intelligence Factory, simply "because they're not SUVs." To the joy of many of their patrons, health-club and restaurant managers have declared war on mobile phones. On National Public Radio, the hosts of "Car Talk" repeatedly play a recording of Massachussetts Senate candidate Jack E. Robinson being rear-ended while talking to a radio reporter on his mobile phone. "Everyone said 'Beautiful! Great! He deserved it, the bum'," says host Tom Magliozzi. Of the touch screens and Global Positioning Systems that carmakers are stuffing into the newest luxury SUVs, Magliozzi says, "What the hell are they thinking?"
In San Francisco, Schadenfreude translates into activism. Long-time residents of the city's Mission District, a working-class neighborhood of auto shops, bodegas and artists' studios, are rebelling against the invasion of the "e-holes" who've transformed the district into a trendy, high-priced haven for Internet start-ups. Now, local activists are backing a controversial ballot initiative that would ban further dot-com office development, and protesters have staged so many sit-ins that most Internet office buildings have posted security guards. Recently, renegades stole the valet-parking tickets from a new restaurant that caters to the digerati. When diners emerged, they had to scramble through neighborhood streets retrieving their own Saabs and Land Rovers, while the artists howled. Critics of dot-com culture say it's unfair to paint them as opponents of progress, or worse, as just plain jealous. "The feeling goes much, much deeper," says Paulina Borsook, author of "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech." "This is about grief. This is about carpetbaggers destroying what used to be a wonderful, vibrant culture." In "I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley," director Jason Ward's cinematic alter ego mourns a paradise lost of fruit orchards and unpretentious, small-town living. He and a hacker friend fight back by launching an e-mail bomb into every computer in the crowded, smog-filled Valley. Ward says he's been surprised by the approving e-mail he's recieved from high-tech workers who are also fed up with the excesses of Internet culture.
Limn furniture owner Dan Friedlander is encouraging his Web-head clientele to get in touch with their inner brick-and-mortar selves. He recently opened a new cafe where patrons are urged to "come in, turn off their cell phones and relax." The place is packed.
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