Time was, any enterprising fifteen-year-old could get himself a handful of Yahoo accounts and show those clowns down at the SEC a thing or two. With investors behaving with all the grace and intelligence of herd animals, a well timed "Boo!" could reap enough rewards to keep you in comics and Playstation II titles well into adolescence. But pump-and-dump requires a chump for the bump, and with markets offering almost nothing but downside, there's little chance that agreeing with yourself in a chat room is going to gain you anything but another session on the couch. Gone is the possibility that any random dot-com might suddenly explode, and with it the average Joe's opportunity for high-end market manipulation.

The era of freebies dies with it. Was it insane to offer eight-seat dinette sets complete with a 12-inch extension leaf over the Web? Of course it was. But that didn't mean that it wasn't thrilling to watch somebody try.

Post-crash, everything has changed. The bulldozers may not have cleared away every virtual storefront — the Internet remains a multi-billion dollar industry — but the Web Bubble is little more than sticky residue on the tip of economic reality's pin. And minus the waist-high piles of cash that irrational exuberance put on the street, the Internet has retreated to older notions of what "free" is really worth: the cats are still free, but the pussy isn't.

It was a wild ride, and now it's over. The spectacle of an industry in full retreat might be good for a few chortles, but it's the kind of laughter you try to choke back at a funeral. We remember the whole story; we know it was a golden age; and we know better than to join in the exultation of dot-com backlashers, old economy scolds, or now-jobless economic naïfs still excited over the prospect that San Francisco housing rates might fall. Because no matter how low prices go, they'll never reach the strike price of $0.00 we all enjoyed for a brief moment in history. Mourn the Web Gold Rush now. We shall not see its like again.

courtesy of The Sucksters

pictures Terry Colon