Totally Wired
The Wild Rise and Crazy Fall of the First Dotcom Dream
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
The story of the dotcom bubble, its tumultuous crash, and the visionary pioneer at its epicentre...
'The Social Network meets Hammer of the Gods via Warhol's Factory' Independent
'Effervescent...vivid...this is a book whose time has come' Sunday Times
One morning in February 2001, Josh Harris woke to the certain knowledge that he was about to lose everything. The man Time magazine called 'The Warhol of the Web' was now reduced to the role of helpless spectator as his personal fortune dwindled from 85 million dollars…to 50 million…to nothing. In the space of a week. If the mania attending those events is hard to recall, it's because when the crash came, the dreams and expectations of those surreal few years were swept away with near Biblical inclemency. More than a decade later, they seem shrouded in a kind of pre-Millennial mist; might never have happened. How easy to forget that at the end of 1999, the world seemed to be spinning off its axis as a new one evolved before our eyes, with anything imaginable seeming to be possible, in real time...
In his bestselling book Moondust, Andrew Smith looked at the lives of the nine remaining Moonwalkers, how their exploits helped shape an era and how that era left its mark on them. In Totally Wired, he goes in search of the truth about one of the most extraordinary and mysterious events of the 20th century, the dotcom bubble of the 1990s, and draws a direct line from there to where we are now.
'A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic and journalist Smith (Moondust) takes a deep dive into the hubris, optimism, and creativity of the dot-com boom-and-bust with an overlong and unfocused profile of an early web impresario, Josh Harris. Harris's Pseudo.com, founded in 1993 and one of the first startups in New York City's "Silicon Alley," was ostensibly conceived as an incubator for content of all stripes. And had it been run capably, it could have been Harris's grasp of the need for unique content was indeed prescient. But in reality, Pseudo was more chaotic bacchanal than business. Drug-fueled parties and Harris's own increasingly bizarre behavior (such as repeatedly coming to work dressed as a clown) were the norm, while banks and investors were too eager to get in on expected riches to look closely or ask enough questions. Smith charts the all-too-familiar arc of an unsustainable economic bubble broadly and often obliquely, with numerous digressions (such as into Alan Greenspan's role in the dot-com boom), while major parts of Harris's story, such as his relationship with his girlfriend, with whom he performed a much-publicized media stunt of living under 24-hour public surveillance, receive little payoff. Smith's initially promising chronicle resembles, finally, a long-form magazine article that's been stretched into a book.
