These developments seemed doubly exciting because popular wisdom had all but written off the web after the 2001 dot-com crash. Investors and journalists claimed that people would never again pay for online content, that Amazon was the victor in the e-commerce wars, and that money, funding, and attention had left the internet, possibly for good. Web 2.0 shone a spotlight back on the young entrepreneurs and "thought leaders" of Silicon Valley. In the process, it brought utopianism back to the front lines and created new investments and personal fortunes.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 54