So what happened? People don’t really know. The closest I’ve come to an answer was that the castle on a cloud we lived in wasn’t built on a solid foundation, but rather on unrestrained optimism, mass hysteria and, above all, pure greed. We knew in the back of our minds that this insane growth and prodigal lifestyle couldn’t last forever, yet the belief that the cow could be milked one day longer despite warning signs to the contrary made the fall that much more difficult. Of course, this truth doesn’t do anything to dispel the bitterness and depression that has taken hold of the Bay. There is a silent anger in the eyes of nearly everyone who works here—the techies who ride the buses, the bankers who walk the streets, even the cabbies who plague the roads (“So damn hard to get a fare these days,” a driver once growled to me)—and they all have stories to tell of not even just fortunes lost, but of simple difficulties making ends meet when businesses are cutting back, prices are still sky high and the end is nowhere in sight.

Maybe some were tricked into coming out West, goaded on by the same visions of utopia that I was. Or maybe some were here before the gold rush, saw the roller-coaster ride pass them by and now are just trying to pick up the pieces. Or at least trying to understand why they couldn’t have been one of the lucky few to make it big. What really matters, though—and what is so easy to overlook—is no one party or group is to blame: everyone here probably had something to do with it. But this isn’t an easy truth to swallow. For those who saw their closest friends thrown out of their jobs and apartments, and for those who had already left behind everything to seek out a life in the Bay Area, believing that no one’s to blame is hard. Scapegoats should be everywhere—yet are nowhere to be found.

Truth be told, I’m seeing the tail end of it now—the worst of it has passed. Even so, people are still seething to themselves, silently hating their jobs and the companies that hacked away their own people, actively seeking headhunters or packing their bags and hopping on a flight out of here. But it was when the atmosphere of turmoil was much worse back in the spring that a coworker had dug out the old newspaper advertisement and had pasted it on the wall. For, as someone later explained to me, “What better than irony to get across the bitterness and frustration at a life that seems so unfair?”

The marketing guy who came up with the “new economy ad” no longer works here. No, he wasn’t fired, but about three weeks into my summer, he decided to pack his bags and return to Apple. I can only fathom that the fantasy utopia still lives on there, in ultra-hip advertising and candy colored computer shells.

But for the rest of us who can’t seem to escape to protective bubbles of security, the palette isn’t cherry reds or tangerine oranges or berry blues. It’s the cold grays of the San Francisco fog that rolls in every morning, reminding us that regardless of what might have been a year or two ago, what really matters is what the world is like today.

Welcome to the new economy. It sure seems a lot like the old.

Robin S. Lee ’03, an economics and mathematics concentrator in Eliot House, is design chair of The Crimson.