Reading Delirious No More by Rem Koolhaas and Life in the Bust Belt by Po Bronson (both in Wired) after another, made me wonder whether there’s an anatomy of booms. Koolhaas writes this about the early years of New York:

New York is built, from 1850 to 1933, in a single spurt of imagination and energy. The first prototype of the modern metropolis, Manhattan is turned into a laboratory to test the potential of modern life in a radical, collective experiment. A free-form coalition of developers, visionaries, writers, architects, and journalists intersects with popular expectations to make the city an extreme and exhilarating democratic machine, one that is able to process all newcomers into New Yorkers.

The Depression halts this, he writes. “After World War II, buildings become “important.” Each is the work of an individual architect, rather than a collective.” In the 1970s, he writes, “An ecology of lawyers, dealmakers, zoning experts, and enablers grotesquely inflate the arcane complexities of “getting things done” and intimidate any outsider into helpless surrender to their intricate cynicism.” From free creativity to tight control.

Bronson’s article is about Silicon Valley hoping for the “Next New Thing”. When it was booming, every idea was tried by everyone (or so it seems to me). Startups were formed for each idea and venture capitalists funded them. … Got to go.