You're completely forgetting "all your jobs are going to get outsourced to India". There was panic that internet connectivity would make local talent obsolete.
Microsoft was in full swing with trying to strangle the computing space. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" was a term coined from that era. Ballmer called Linux "a cancer". [0]
People were in a panic about Napster and how the internet would steal billions of dollars.
It does seem like people are much more against AI now than the dot-com boom then, but it's all looks and sounds very familiar to me.
> You're completely forgetting "all your jobs are going to get outsourced to India". There was panic that internet connectivity would make local talent obsolete.
That was largely in the latter part of the boom and part of the bust afterward. I recall some words from Carly Fiorina being said (“Forget the engineers”) that seemed to foretell the more extractive future.
Depends on how you define "normies". Sure, students happily napstered away, but a lot of adults (even those with no financial stake in the music industry) seriously believed the claims of the music executives that this "piracy" was going to destroy music and needed to be stopped.
Right before the Millenium, mainstream media like the NYT was blaming the internet and "violent games like Tribe, Doom and Quake" for the Columbine Massacre [0] and other similar mass shootings in the 90s.
A lot of those reporters are now leadership at major newspapers like the NYT (eg. Applebome who linked Doom with Columbine and is now the Deputy National Editor for the NYT).
A large amount of reporters (both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists) discussing technology today are literally boomers who have been fighting this battle against each other since the 1990s and taking all the airtime away from alternative younger voices on both sides.
The claims of "adopt Internet/AI or be left behind" were similar but for some reason the reactions are different.