Klondike Capitalism
After the Gold Rush Klondike Capitalism describes the feverish, high-risk, high-reward ethos that defined the early internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like the original Klondike Gold Rush, it was an age of mass migration to unclaimed terrain, where outsiders, misfits, and visionaries staked claims on intangible resources—attention, code, network effects—armed more with audacity than maps. That chaotic confidence produced both explosive innovation and spectacular collapses, and its imprint still shapes how we imagine technological possibility. Definition Klondike Capitalism names a cultural and economic posture: a rush toward speculative opportunity on a frontier with weak institutions, shallow norms, and enormous informational asymmetries. It presumes that new ground can be claimed quickly, that narratives and valuations can precede validation, and that the social reward for being first often outweighs the penalty for failure. In practice t...