Dotcom 1.0 had a lot of problems, but an unwillingness by corporations to take weird aesthetic risks or involve avant-garde artists was not among them. I kind of miss that freewheeling aspect of the industry.
Once upon a time, people had so much free time that they needed a place to go that wasn’t work or home. A third place.
Such places existed long before the term was coined in the late 1980s, but it took the same general prosperity of the 1990s that allowed Sony to hire Lynch for corporate America and the media-industrial complex to explicitly embrace and monetise the “third place” (mainly in the form of the coffee shop: see Starbucks, “Friends”, “Seinfeld”, “Frasier”, etc.)
