The end of the 1990s was marked by economic euphoria. The Internet was sufficiently evolved to indicate its economic potential. For a brief moment, it seemed as if we found the technology that could remedy the shortcomings of economic systems: businesses would no longer be able to profiteer while abusing the consumer’s information gaps, employees would no longer be bound geographical to the area of their residence and homoeconomicus would cease to be an egoist who lives a life of rational solitude. The traditional dichotomy between real and financial businesses began to dissolve, and we were faced with a new, rich world of economic concepts and entities.
However, already at the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century it dawned on us that our reality testing is faulted. The dot.com bubble exploded and many investors lost their fortunes, the web’s accessibility proved a huge breach that tempts intellectual property thieves and the vast amount of information returned by search engines was based primarily on “payless work” done by others. Today, it is no longer possible to conceive of a life without the web, and we begin to realize that the Internet may restrict our Lebensraum while spinning a kind of “internal web” that binds us. Practices such as online popular justice may explode in our face in the form of shaming, but still many of us will not relinquish the social web. About twenty years after the Internet began to transform the world and new conceptual tools emerged in its wake, it is evident that we are stuck in an aporia. This course will examine the way in which concepts from the field of management and economy have changed from the euphoria at the end of the 1990s to today’s aporia.