Member-only story
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…
