Modern · 2000
The Internet Era
The public web was a decade old by 2000, but the year marks the moment it became the place business happened. Amazon, eBay, and a crowd of less lucky startups had spent the late 1990s proving that strangers would buy from a screen. The dot-com crash of 2000–2001 wiped out the pretenders and left the infrastructure standing: browsers, broadband on the way, payment systems, and a generation that expected information to be searchable.
Work reorganized around the connection. A job no longer had to sit near its customer, its files, or its coworkers. That single fact is responsible for more new occupations than any particular website.
New rooms in the building
Webmasters, a title that peaked and then dissolved, were the generalists who registered the domain, wrote the pages, and restarted the server. As sites became businesses, the generalist split. Designers, front-end and back-end developers, database administrators, and system administrators took the pieces. Information architects and usability specialists appeared because a site that confused people did not sell. Online merchandisers and search-marketing staff appeared because a site that nobody found did not sell either.
Customer service moved onto email, then live chat. A representative could handle several conversations and could be located anywhere with a connection, which companies used both to extend hours and to move the work to cheaper labor markets. The call-center boom of this era is an internet story as much as a telephone story. The headset stayed. The building often moved.
What became cheap
Travel agents lost the simple booking to airline sites and then to aggregators. Stockbrokers lost the routine trade to online discount houses. Encyclopedia sales, classified advertising, and a great deal of routine reference librarianship lost their toll booth, because the information was no longer scarce. The people who survived in those fields moved up, into trips that were actually complicated, advice that was actually personal, or collections that were actually physical.
Newsrooms felt it as both a distribution shock and a jobs shock. A paper that had employed a composing room, a circulation department, and a large display-ad staff was now competing with a site that could publish with a fraction of the production labor. The reporter remained. The ladder around the reporter got shorter.
The always-on shift
Email ended the clean edge of the day for knowledge workers. A message sent at ten at night expected an answer before morning, and the tools to send it were now in the house. The occupation did not change its name. Its hours did. That unpaid expansion of the shift is one of the internet's largest effects on work, and it never shows up as a new job title, which is why it is easy to leave out.
By the end of the decade the internet was no longer a sector. It was the condition of the other sectors. The titles that sounded futuristic in 2000, webmaster, content producer, e-commerce manager, became ordinary and then, some of them, old-fashioned. Ordinary is the sign that a technology has finished arriving.
Work that grew
- Web developer
- System administrator
- E-commerce manager
- Online customer-service agent
- Search-marketing specialist
Work that lost its place
- Routine travel agent
- Print classifieds sales
- Webmaster as a one-person website
- Encyclopedia sales
Companies of this chapter
Largest
- Microsoft
The most valuable company of the moment, and the defendant in the era's defining antitrust case.
- General Electric
Still treated as the best-run company in the world, and a huge employer far from the web.
- ExxonMobil
Formed in 1999. Proof that energy, not websites, still produced the largest profits.
New at the time
- Amazon
Founded in 1994 and, after the crash, the firm that convinced people to buy ordinary goods from a screen.
- Google
Founded in 1998. Within a few years, the advertising machine that paid for a large part of the public web.
- eBay
The marketplace that showed a stranger would pay another stranger, with the company taking a cut.