The Rise and Fall of the Dot-Com Foosball Table

The Jungian symbol of supposedly “liberated” work

Back during the dot-com boom of the late 90s, if you visited one of the then-hot startups in San Francisco — or other major US cities like New York — there was an emerging workplace aesthetic.

Ties were out; skater clothes were in. Cubicles were becoming passé — many dot-coms embraced the big, wide, open spaces where everyone sort of roamed around all day in a daze. There’d be beanbag chairs to flop into, and a sugar-rush of free snacks in the kitchen. And, with eerie omnipresence, was one object:

A foosball table.

Foosball tables were so common in dot-com firms that they became the Jungian symbol of the age. Those tables meant a lot — certainly to the company’s founders, who frequently plopped them down right in the office lobby. They were the first thing you beheld when you showed up to visit WeSellBagsOfRocksOnline.com. (Free shipping!)

What, precisely, was the intended message of all those foosball tables?

That these dot-com firms were unlike any form of company that came before. Work wasn’t really work. No, jobs at these companies were playful, free-form, creative! Hierarchies, like those dreaded ties sported by the loser replicants of IBM, were gone. These were democratized firms where you could bring your whole self to work, along with your dog, your collection of figurines, your old Atari 2600 console with your copy of the ET cartridge personally recovered from a New Mexican dump site. Your parents may have toiled for some soul-crushingly windowless uncreative place where fluorescent lights buzzed with the background radiation of a dying corporate America, but you — you were gonna be an empowered employee. Stock options! You’ll retire before 30.

This sales pitch was, as you might imagine, hilariously false.

I began to intuit this when, after my umpteenth visit to a dot-com firm, I realized I rarely ever saw anyone playing foosball.

The employees didn’t really have time. They were often pulling incredibly long hours, going late into the evening, trying to serve the mercurial dictates of gormless twentysomething founders who frequently had no idea what the heck they were doing. It didn’t help that these overstressed employees were, month by month, growing dimly aware that the business models for which they pulled grindset 12-hour workshifts were ripe for imminent collapse: Selling 70-pound bags of rocks for $9.99, with free shipping that cost the company $80 each time. The only people this made sense for were the investors, who’d cash out during a fizzy IPO, leaving Main Street investors holding the bag.

I gotta hand it to those dot-com CEOs, though. They deftly understood the psychological appeal of those foosball tables — as well as the Nerf guns, the dogs, the graffiti-painted walls, the in-house DJs. They were the first corporate overlords to intuit that making the office feel like a free-food playland might ensorcell young employees into never leaving the building: Make it seem like the coolest place to be.

And sometimes, of course, it was! At times, some of those dot-com joints could be a blast. They held some terrific parties. The dogs were fun. The general idea of making a workplace non-loathsome has real merits.

It’s the gauzy promise of employee empowerment that, it turns out, was hokum. One can change the aesthetics of an office, but it doesn’t change where true power lies. I saw tons of young workers grind like mad for months (or a few years, if their dot-com started earlier than most), then wind up with zero (or vanishingly teensy) amounts of stock — the absolute lion’s share went to investors and the founders. Those supposedly fun and “open” dot-coms were also aquiver with positively gibbering ageism (the resulting lawsuits were informative, for sure), and were gloweringly hostile to anyone who had adult responsibilities that might interfere with a 24/7 commitment to pushing pixels. By all means, bring your dog to work — but wow, ew, please don’t have kids.

And of course, all those empowered, fun-loving employees were hurled out the door anyway, when things went sour.

And oh my goodness did they ever go sour.

I’m publishing this piece on March 10, the anniversary of the day that in 2000 NASDAQ’s four-year tech-fuelled run popped — and the exchange went into a freefall, losing 75% of its value over the next two years. I visited a few firms in their final days, and it was like a neutron bomb had gone off: A forest of silent Aeron chairs, but nary a human in sight. In San Francisco, Video Amusements — a company that had leased tons of foosball tables to local dot-coms — drove around to collect them.

What lived on, though, is that psychological ploy: That one could coax crazy hours out of employees by making the workplace into a Neverland, a place they wouldn’t want to leave. And again, this wasn’t always bad. The sumptuous offices that emerged in the Silicon Valley boom of the late 00s and 2010s were really sweet. If you were a high-value employee, there was even some genuinely valuable stock available on this revolution of the merry-go-round. Not so much for the phalanxes of contractors and traumatized social-media moderators that help keep today’s tech giants in business, though.

Today’s younger generation may be seeing through the ploy, though. Many of them have a healthy suspicion of the grindcore mindset; books like “Work Won’t Love You Back” and “Laziness Does Not Exist” have become bestsellers.

I’m sure many of them would enjoy a round of foosball. It’s fun! But crafting an economy, and a society, that offers jobs where workers have some actual power? That’s a whole other game.

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I’m a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. I’m also the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. I’m @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram, and @[email protected] on Mastodon.