While there are several key differences between the type of companies involved in the dot-com boom and those dubbed Web 2.0, dot-com companies served as a template for the way that creative, technically savvy labor functioned in urban centers from the 1990s onward. The emphasis on self-actualization through work was drawn directly from boomtime philosophy. The philosophy of self-branding, or promoting oneself like a corporate entity, appeared during the boom, as did the lofty idealism and wild rhetoric of changing the world that permeated the time period.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 143