I very much beg to differ. I remember it very well, as the company I worked for laid off almost all of their workers and it was impossible to find a job. All companies froze hiring. People lost fortunes (including retirement accounts). The nasdaq went from 4800 to 1840. There was a major recession.

The amount of malinvestment in AI is so much worse than the Internet bubble. It's basically the only reason the US economy didn't contract hard the last few months. Making data centers for AI has been creating a lot of construction jobs.

It's going to be painful when it pops, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later.

maybe you didn't live in a city that had a lot of the Internet start-ups, but the Internet bubble was felt by millions of people. I lived in Seattle and it had a lasting impact on everything.

The dotcom bubble destroyed a lot of retirement accounts people had no ability to choose the companies invested in as they were often generic, broad, investment portfolios. It also killed a lot of lower end white collar jobs, and damaged a lot of local government investments, leading to steep declines in those services. There are numerous other ways non-tech people were affected, but I don't feel like writing a bunch.

I am interested to know how old you were when that dotcom bubble popped, though.

The dotcom bubble pop took out a lot of funds and a lot of businesses. A lot of things you could buy on the Internet stopped being available online for a bit as so many vendors tanked. Ultimately the equivalent of almost everything you would have remembered came back, but there was a retreat.