Futuristic Musings · by James Brown
1999 was a rehearsal
By James Brown · Published · Updated
The dot-com bubble burst, and the internet still won. A musing on manias, crashes, and who's still standing afterward.
In 2000 the Nasdaq crashed and plenty of people declared the internet overhyped. They were right about the prices and wrong about the internet. Fiber laid by bankrupt companies became the backbone that streaming, cloud and social media ran on.
Will AI have its own 2000? Maybe. Capital cycles overshoot. That's nearly a law. But overbuilt infrastructure tends to become tomorrow's cheap substrate. If we overbuild compute and power, the next generation of builders inherits both, at a discount.
The lesson isn't "buy everything" or "sell everything." It's: stay in the game long enough to see the payoff. Diversify, don't use leverage you don't understand, and keep building skills that compound regardless of the ticker.
This essay is opinion and speculation, not factual reporting or financial advice.