Logo Jamming

This is my culture jamming project in two parts. The first is a logo from the media giant Comcast that I changed to read .com costs. For me it was a given, changing it in this way. Having lived in the Bay Area in the late ninties, early 2000 and hearing and reading about the new internet businesses that were making millions overnight and then failing horribly. It wasn't a stretch to associate an internet provider with a boom and bust business model that is now referred to as the .com bubble in an obvious way, they provide access to the internet. At the time, I thought .com businesses were largely a huge scam, hearing about new internet companies that make their stock public and are worth millions, literally, overnight. Although I didn't understand how the market worked, and it seemed possible that millions of people were buying something from a location on the web and that somewhere there was an office with a server housing a website that sold light bulbs and somewhere else there was a warehouse shipping these light bulbs, etc. It seemed idiotic not to invest in these businesses since they were an extention of the technology that was already wildly successful. Not that I played the stock market, but even I could see that reading along in the papers and watching my parents fix up their house with the money they were borrowing against their stocks. Microsoft stocks kept doubling their value, it seemed every three months. People who had invested money in it, say their 401k retirement money, were suddenly "successful". Their was a steady feeling about things, nobody wanted to rock the boat, just let it keep doubling. It didn't seem that weird that people would carry this mentality into investing in an internet business. Like "oh, a computer business" let's watch these stocks double up.

Most of the early businesses survived on investor's money alone without ever being profitable, until they weren't reporting profits, people pulled their money out and the business went bankrupt. When the bubble burst, meaning the inflated idea of what a company was worth was replaced with the reality of what it was actually worth, the value of many of these companies dropped dramatically, all in the span of one weekend. Many businesses failed and many people were forced to put their fabulous lives on hold.

There are other "costs" that come to mind stemming from the .com boom. Namely the cost of living going up. Especially in the Bay Area. While these businesses were working hard to look good on paper and raking in dough, they were also hiring some pretty well groomed, highly paid associates. It's like suddenly some jerk was willing to pay double, triple the rent of an SF apartment and your landlord would either evict you or in some cases buy you out of the lease. Some of these lease buy out deals were for thousands of dollars. I would hear of people being paid 10 thousand to move out of their SF loft. Then move to Portland and buy a house! It was like a transfusion happening, driven by people needing to take advantage of these people with money to spend. At one point there was a 1% vacancy rate in SF. People couldn't find a place to live. Living in Oakland, I started to see the same trend. People getting evicted on "legal" grounds, like "my family is moving in". A friend of mine won a settlement when his landlord evicted him only to double the rent on the place. Trying to rent at that time meant showing up to some crappy apartment to compete with 25 other people and pay a "processing" fee in excess of $150! That was just to turn in your application and be rejected! Suckers!

Yeah, internet businesses failed leaving investors with an urge to somehow win their money back and we're still paying inflated rents if you ask me, but what does an internet provider have to do with it? Maybe nothing? Relating Comcast to the .com bubble is admittedly a pretty loose connection. But anyone who uses Comcast, with their inflated, ever increasing rates on packaged channels could get the reference as well. Plus .com is short for commerce, so there's always the literal reference.