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This chapter draws lessons from the experience of the first wave of the “new economy” for thinking about media production, and describes the ways to apply the concept of venture labor to work outside of the Internet industry. Silicon Alley’s legacy of media and of work can offer lessons for the future. The lessons from the ways in which work emerged online in the dot-com era help in the understanding of the motivations and challenges of what might be called the social media era. The chapter suggests that the trick for future media and business revolutions will be to find ways to support venture labor, so that innovative and creative jobs can also be stable and good jobs.

This chapter concentrates on the strategies that people in Silicon Alley used for managing the economic risks they felt they faced. It utilizes the interview data to build a typology of venture labor strategies that is rooted in the valuation process, and describes how people talked about the risks they faced and what communicative frameworks they used to manage these risks. The chapter also discusses in detail the strategies for managing risk among Silicon Alley workers—financial, creative, and actuarial—and shows that they are coconstitutive of the industrial space of Silicon Alley. These strategies also emphasize the different approaches to economic uncertainty undertaken by people who worked within the industry. Moreover, people are adapting to a new, generalized work insecurity.

This chapter, which is concerned with the stock market crash, uses the interview data after the dot-com bust along with historical materials to illustrate some of the problems facing venture labor. It specifically explores the multiple framings of the dot-com crash and the impact of these contestations for people working in Silicon Alley, and more broadly, for the relationship to market structures. Building on the work of David Stark, Michel Callon, and Don Slater, the chapter argues that the way in which people’s perceptions determine the market and the way in which people respond to the market need to be more often considered in tandem as forces of both market construction and rational action. It reveals that dot-commers in Silicon Alley grappled with a problem which generations of workers from every sector have had to face.

Here I outline how the turn toward affective branding has shaped a new image regime facilitating the model industry’s rapid expansion into a global network, broadening the field for scouting of prospective models, intensifying competition and turnover as a result. Increasing interest in tapping into affect’s vitality has intensified glamour labor as model managers have sought tighter control of their charges. This chapter tracks how the tightening of control over models was met with a widening field of scouting for new recruits to the industry. As the public’s exposure to and interest in fashion has grown apace, fashion weeks have proliferated beyond the traditional fashion hubs, and scouting for new models has reached into ever-more remote regions. Consequently, modeling contests have grown in size and number, modeling agencies have opened offices in dozens of countries, and fashion has become “news” as television shows and websites treating fashion became commonplace. Banking on the new value of mutability, model scouts ranged farther afield in search of that precious combination of features that might make millions. The age of the blink facilitated this expansion, converting more of the population into a standing reserve, made ready for their makeovers by a steady diet of reality television and twenty-four- hour access to the newest fashions, updated by the minute.

This chapter dives deeply into the subculture of hackathons as a paradigmatic event of the new economy. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with participants at seven public hackathons sponsored by companies in New York, the account shows how the weekend-long competition to write computer code socializes highly skilled, young tech workers to produce “innovation” on demand. Corporate sponsors appeal to participants’ love of coding and “building things” as well as their desire to build their résumés, promising jobs, networking, and glory to winners who can produce marketable products and ideas. Participants willingly engage in both self-exploitation and self-promotion, aware that corporate sponsors have the upper hand but enjoying the sense of play, mutual learning, and collaboration-with-competition that hackathons foster. The combination of self-exploitation and self-promotion, amid both emotional and rational appeals, represents the culture of the new economy and sets a new, permeable boundary between personal life, workspace, and worktime.