[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

We may have the dot.com bubble of 1995 to 2000 [to thank] for making [the rise of social media] possible. The Internet could not become an effective large scale global communication system for personal and business use without exponential increases in speed and bandwidth capacity from the dial-up era. Accomplishing that would require multiple transatlantic fiber optic cables. In the late 1980s this became technologically feasible but still seemed too expensive to be financially feasible. However, aggressive telecommunications companies such as Worldcom achieved unrealistic market capitalization during the bubble, giving them unimagined capital. So many companies used that capital to lay fiber optic cable that they created not merely a robust telecommunications system but a system with so much excess capacity that transmission costs approached zero. The dot.com bubble left financial wreckage to be sure, but also bequeathed to the twentieth-first century the technological infrastructure that has made our wired society possible.