The Fear We Forget

Cyclic Disruption: A Series on Technology and Human Nature

The Situation

In the late 1990s, I was consulting in the middle of the dot-com rush. The mood in business was electric, almost frantic. Startups were sprouting overnight, often with little more than a name, a pitch deck, and a URL. Venture money was everywhere. Newspapers declared the end of the “old economy.” And everywhere I went, the same refrain echoed: the internet was going to rewrite the rules.

I spent my days — and many of my nights — building systems for companies that believed they were reshaping the future. Some of those systems had real weight. They improved how customers were served, how supply chains were managed, how decisions were made. But just as often, what we were building was theater. Business models were scribbled on napkins. Revenue forecasts stretched beyond reason. Code was written to impress investors more than users. We were building props for a story about the future, not the future itself.

Still, the atmosphere was intoxicating. Everyone felt they were riding a wave that couldn’t be stopped. And yet, even in the midst of all that momentum, you could sense the fragility. Beneath the optimism was doubt — unspoken, but real. Not everything would survive.

When the crash came, it came quickly. Stock prices collapsed. Companies folded overnight. People who had been hailed as visionaries were now written off as reckless. The same executives who had been chasing the “new economy” just months earlier dismissed it as a fad that serious businesses should have avoided.

The Pattern Emerges

The crash was dramatic, but what I remember most is how quickly the story changed.

Just months earlier, leaders had been desperate to launch internet strategies. Suddenly, those same leaders claimed they had known all along it was a bubble. The panic of the moment was reframed as wisdom in hindsight. And then, almost without notice, the cycle reset again.

Quietly, out of the wreckage, came the companies that actually endured: Amazon, eBay, Salesforce. The tools that mattered didn’t disappear. They matured. What had been dismissed as speculative excess revealed a core of lasting value — buried beneath the noise, waiting for the culture and the market to catch up.

This rewriting of the story is what fascinates me most. We forget the fear. The hesitation. The second-guessing. Once a tool becomes part of everyday life, the uncertainty fades, and we tell ourselves adoption was obvious all along.

A Familiar Reflex

This pattern is older than the internet.

Railroads triggered speculative bubbles in the 1840s. Investors lost fortunes, critics declared the experiment a failure, and then railroads quietly rewrote the geography of commerce. Early electricity was met with suspicion and fear — too dangerous, too unnatural — and then with disappointment when its early uses seemed trivial. Only later did it become so embedded in daily life that we stopped noticing it.

The cycle is familiar: first the excitement, then the fear, then the retreat — and finally the forgetting. We panic, we resist, we adjust, and then we erase the memory of what came before. Each generation convinces itself its disruption is unprecedented, when in truth it is following a rhythm as old as innovation itself.

Why This Matters Now

We are living through another version of this rhythm today. New tools are being celebrated as revolutionary while also stirring deep anxiety. You can already see the pattern forming: fascination, fear, normalization.

The danger isn’t the fear itself. Fear has value. It slows us down. It forces questions we might otherwise ignore: What does this mean for jobs? For security? For trust? Fear is a survival instinct, and in many contexts it serves us well.

The real danger is forgetting it. Once the tools are normalized, the fear fades. And when it fades, so do the lessons it carried. We tell ourselves adoption was inevitable, that resistance was foolish, that the cycle was smoother than it really was. And in doing so, we rob ourselves of perspective. We walk unprepared into the next cycle because we convinced ourselves the last one was painless.

Your Next Encounter

The next time you feel that familiar mix of excitement and unease, pause and notice it. That moment of fear is not weakness. It’s a clue — a marker of change pressing in on habit.

The fear always passes with time. The question is whether we will remember enough of it to recognize the next cycle when it starts, whether we’ll use it to ask better questions before the answers become obvious. Will we learn to document the uncertainty so we can benefit from it later, rather than pretending it never existed?

Previous post: The Report That Wasn’t There

Next in this series: “Declaring Agile by Fiat” — Why inflated promises collapse, and what survives them.

About this series: Cyclic Disruption explores patterns in how humans adapt to transformative technology, drawn from four decades of experience in development, consulting, and leadership. Each essay connects a past moment to today’s dilemmas — showing what we can learn when we stop treating our own creations as strangers.