Novelist and sometime Wired contributor Po Bronson had some thoughts on his own complicity in inflating the dot-com bubble, published yesterday in the New York Times Magazine.The article, entitled “Calculating the Loss and Blame in Silicon Valley,“ has been trumped along with most of yesterday’s issue by a special edition of the magazine focusing on the World Trade Center tragedy. Bronson has a copy of it posted on his own Web site here.

He says, “I was publicly associated with the entire shebang, parties and billionaires and IPOs. I leveraged the hype to build my career. At the very height of the fever, in the summer of 1999, I posed alongside some of my subjects for a cover of Wired magazine. So if apologies are to be made, I’ve lately come to think, I should be apologizing myself.”

I find that sentiment mildly laudatory, but I won’t hold out for similar acts of contrition (even at much smaller scales) from the mendacious snake-oil salesmen that turned a tremendous amount of genuine potential into this pathetic mess.