[TheRealPomax]

If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.

Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.

[fragmede]

In the year 2000, Google was fresh, the Internet was becoming a normal thing for people to use and it was supposed to get rid of the old power structures and bring about a new age of egalitarianism and meritocracy. Plus I was younger and much more idealistic. And to be fair, it has caused revolutions and caused new power structures to be established, and torn down old ones. But as the old adage goes, it turns out that power corrupts. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'd like to pretend I'd do better with my money if I'd invented PageRank back in the 90's, but having seen how money corrupts people, I'm not convinced that I would.