President Clinton himself hosted a White House Conference on the New Economy in April of 2000, claiming the marvelous new era to be the product of a balanced federal budget and the deregulatory program he had enacted during his time in office.2 The protagonists of this economic story were our familiar friends: the “learning class,” the “wired workers,” the “symbolic analysts.” Innovation was the driving force behind this new era, sometimes personified by Wall Street, on other occasions by Silicon Valley. The place where the magic happened was “the ideopolis”: the postindustrial city, where
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