Totally Wired
The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle
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- US$11.99
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"The Social Network meets Hammer of the Gods" in this story of a 1990s web titan who made a fortune and lost it all—and what happened afterward (The Independent).
One day in February 2001, Josh Harris woke to certain knowledge that he was about to lose everything. The man Time magazine called "The Warhol of the Web" was reduced to a helpless spectator as his fortune dwindled from 85 million dollars to nothing, all in the space of a week.
Harris had been a maverick genius preternaturally adapted to the new online world. He founded New York's first dotcom, Pseudo.com, and paved the way for a cadre of twentysomethings to follow, riding a wave of tech euphoria to unimagined wealth and fame for five years—before the great dotcom crash, in which Web 1.0 was wiped from the face of the earth. Long before then, though, Harris's view of the web had darkened, and he began a series of lurid social experiments aimed at illustrating his worst fear: that the internet would soon alter the very fabric of society—cognitive, social, political, and otherwise.
In Totally Wired, journalist Andrew Smith seeks to unravel the opaque and mysterious episodes of the early dotcom craze, in which the seeds of our current reality were sown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Harris and those who worked alongside him in downtown Manhattan's "Silicon Alley," the tale moves from a compound in Ethiopia through New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, London, and Salt Lake City, Utah; from the dawn of the web to the present, taking in the rise of alternative facts, troll society, and the unexpected origins of the net itself, as our world has grown uncannily to resemble the one Harris predicted—and urged us to evade.
"Raucous, whimsical, sad and very funny…a fascinating account of what could have been, what briefly was, what almost lasted." ―TheWall Street Journal
"Told with verve and style…A valuable history." ―Kirkus Reviews
"A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web."―The Guardian
"Dark and compelling."―Daily Mail
"This is a book whose time has come."―Sunday Times
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.
