PDF Totally Wired The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle eBook Andrew Smith
Download As PDF : Totally Wired The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle eBook Andrew Smith
From award-winning journalist Andrew Smith, the never before told story of the late 1990s dot-com bubble, its tumultuous crash, and the rise and fall of the visionary pioneer at its epicenter.
One morning in February 2001, internet entrepreneur Josh Harris woke to 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, all in the space of a week.
Harris had been New York’s first net millionaire, a maverick genius so preternaturally adapted to the fluid virtualities of the new online world that he saw it with a clarity almost no one else did. He founded the city’s first dotcom, Pseudo.com, and paved the way for a cadre of net-savvy twentysomethings to follow, riding a wave of tech euphoria to unimagined wealth and fame for five years, before losing it all in the great dotcom crash of 2000, in which Web 1.0 was wiped from the face of the earth. Long before then, however, Harris’s view of where the web would take us 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, award-winning author and journalist Andrew Smith seeks to unravel the opaque and mysterious episodes of the twentieth century dotcom craze, in which the seeds of our current reality were sown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Harris and the former pioneers who worked alongside him in downtown Manhattan's "Silicon Alley," the narrative moves from a compound in the wild south of 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 retro-truth, troll society, the unexpected origins of the net itself, as our world has grown uncannily to resemble the one Harris predicted—and had urged us to evade.
PDF Totally Wired The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle eBook Andrew Smith
"I'm really torn about how to review this book. On the one hand, it offers an incredibly valuable look back at the 90's dotcom boom times, an era that deserves much more attention than it receives. On the other hand, a lot of the most valuable analysis comes only after a quixotic first-person quest to locate and understand the unknowable -- the enigmatic founder of Psuedo, Josh Harris. To me, the book suffers from the same thing that Pseudo did: an excellent premise that ultimately gets sidetracked by an obsession with celebrity/fame. Ultimately whether Harris is telling the truth or not, or whether he is a genius, or whether he is an artist, is irrelevant in my mind. Harris isn't the point. Those of use who watched and engaged with Pseudo were part of something bigger than one person, until it suddenly disappeared forever. I finished the book having a lot more questions about the Pseudo community itself, and how the Internet has lost so much of what initially made it such an exciting, unpredictable place. I thank the author for prompting me to ask these questions myself, but I would have also loved to focus more on why Pseudo mattered rather than deciphering exactly what had transpired in those crazy, early Internet years."
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Totally Wired The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle eBook Andrew Smith Reviews :
Totally Wired The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle eBook Andrew Smith Reviews
- Loved that book! So meticulous, so entertaining. Absolute must-read.
- An interesting and fascinating book, full of information about a fascinating time.
It's bit boring at the beginning unless you are interested in the character he talks about, then it starts with facts, name and fascinating stories of less known name of the dotcom time.
I liked the style of writing and the book kept my attention till the last page.
Recommended!
Many thanks to Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine. - I'm really torn about how to review this book. On the one hand, it offers an incredibly valuable look back at the 90's dotcom boom times, an era that deserves much more attention than it receives. On the other hand, a lot of the most valuable analysis comes only after a quixotic first-person quest to locate and understand the unknowable -- the enigmatic founder of Psuedo, Josh Harris. To me, the book suffers from the same thing that Pseudo did an excellent premise that ultimately gets sidetracked by an obsession with celebrity/fame. Ultimately whether Harris is telling the truth or not, or whether he is a genius, or whether he is an artist, is irrelevant in my mind. Harris isn't the point. Those of use who watched and engaged with Pseudo were part of something bigger than one person, until it suddenly disappeared forever. I finished the book having a lot more questions about the Pseudo community itself, and how the Internet has lost so much of what initially made it such an exciting, unpredictable place. I thank the author for prompting me to ask these questions myself, but I would have also loved to focus more on why Pseudo mattered rather than deciphering exactly what had transpired in those crazy, early Internet years.
- Moondust is one of my favourite reads of all time, so when I heard there was a new book out by Andrew Smith I bought it - and it's just so nice to be in the company of this author again.
Without giving too much of the game away, Smith takes us on a journey that starts in London, then swerves abruptly to Ethiopia, then on to New York, then off to Utah... anywhere that he can find JOSH.
It's a wild ride as he tries to track down one of the strangest characters our modern world has created.
Like I say, I don't want to give too much of the game away... but the person he's after is Josh Harris. An oddball, possibly autistic, geekus who ruled the party-scene of nineties New York, much as Warhol had a generation earlier. His early experiments in `living in public' (his term) prefigure Big Brother, Facebook and any other `social media' invasion you can think of.
I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of this guy. But more than that, I couldn't believe that I had forgotten a time when this didn't exist. For the first time in years I stopped and thought about the first time I had used the internet and when that was. I suddenly realized how much the world has changed.
`May you live in interesting times'.
The gift of this book is to remind us that we do. Smith charts the history of the dotcom boom-bust-reboom and offers us a space to think about its implications
I wouldn't say that at the end of the book I had answers to these questions. But I had, at least, started to think about it - and when you do think about it, it is amazing.
You may not be of a like-mind to me, but if you are, in chapter 20 you will find out something about (*)ankers shenanigans - and how they financed the dotcom `bust' - that throws yet more perspective on the times in which we live. - Moondust is one of my favourite reads of all time, so when I heard there was a new book out by Andrew Smith I bought it - and it's just so nice to be in the company of this author again.
Without giving too much of the game away, Smith takes us on a journey that starts in London, then swerves abruptly to Ethiopia, then on to New York, then off to Utah... anywhere that he can find JOSH.
It's a wild ride as he tries to track down one of the strangest characters our modern world has created.
Like I say, I don't want to give too much of the game away... but the person he's after is Josh Harris. An oddball, possibly autistic, geekus who ruled the party-scene of nineties New York, much as Warhol had a generation earlier. His early experiments in `living in public' (his term) prefigure Big Brother, Facebook and any other `social media' invasion you can think of.
I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of this guy. But more than that, I couldn't believe that I had forgotten a time when this didn't exist. For the first time in years I stopped and thought about the first time I had used the internet and when that was. I suddenly realized how much the world has changed.
`May you live in interesting times'...
The gift of this book is to remind us that we do. Smith charts the history of the dotcom boom-bust-reboom and offers us a space to think about its implications.
I wouldn't say that at the end of the book I had answers to these questions. But I had, at least, started to think about it - and when you do think about it, it is amazing.
You may not be of a like-mind to me, but if you are, in chapter 20 you will find out something about the (*)ankers shenanigans - and how they financed the dotcom `bust' - that throws yet more perspective on the times in which we live.
(*)astards.
