Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle

by Andrew Smith

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802129345
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Pages:	412
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Andrew Smith has worked as a critic and feature writer for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, The Observer, and The Face. He is the author of the internationally bestselling Moondust, about the nine remaining men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. He lives in California.

Read an Excerpt

The city seems to roll on forever, a bruised carapace of concrete and dust and patchwork shanty settlements. At times the road south is more theoretical than real, three-quarter collapsed into craters that would swallow a four-by-four whole, around which lorries and buses creep like lines of ants. Our Land Cruiser crashes through potholes with the ballistic rattle of machine-gunfire, as—

Eucalypts jut from hills
Traffic screams.
People swarm everywhere.

Our descent reminds me that Addis Ababa is a mile high. Last night I was light-headed and couldn’t work out why.

I can hardly remember how I got here: after making contact with Harris, everything moved so fast. Harris advised me not to call, citing a “mysterious buzz” on his line. The internet scarcely works in Ethiopia, he added, but emails could be sent slowly and painfully between one and three in the morning. He was in the deep south on the shores of Lake Awassa, not far from the lawless Somali border – eight bone-splitting hours’ drive from Addis with no alternative means of travel. Asked why he was there, he told me he was editing a film on game fishing, which answered my question not at all.

My hope that he might find himself somewhere more accessible in the near future was quickly dashed. “i’m pretty much strapped in here…” he wrote “off the grid you might say LOL…”

The only way I could be sure of ever meeting or even speaking to Josh Harris, who had a history of disappearance and unpredictability, would be to travel to Ethiopia.

Editorial Reviews

12/24/2018

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. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Totally Wired:

“Raucous, whimsical, sad and very funny…Totally Wired is a fascinating account of what could have been, what briefly was, what almost lasted.” —Wall Street Journal

“Told with verve and style…A valuable history for tech heads, entrepreneurs, and trend watchers alike.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Exhilarating…Totally Wired examines just how thin the line is between brilliance and madness.” —Shelf Awareness

"A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web"—Guardian

"Dark and compelling. The counter culture tremor from which the social media earthquake erupted"—Daily Mail

"The Social Network meets Hammer of the Gods via Warhol's Factory"—Independent

"Effervescent and vivid...this is a book whose time has come."—Sunday Times

"Fascinating...a slice of life never to be repeated...the first incarnation of the internet of the 1990s."—Observer


Praise for Moondust:

“Moondust is an inspired idea, immaculately executed: witty, affectionate, completely captivating.” —WORD magazine

“Highly entertaining…[Smith’s] superb book is a fitting tribute to a unique band of 20th-century heroes.” —GQ

“[A] fascinating book… [Smith’s] humour is underpinned by a sense of extreme danger.” —Mail on Sunday, Book of the Week

“A rich mix of cultural history, reportage and personal reflection.” —Evening Standard

“Forget flower power, the Beatles and Beach Boys…what made the 1960s an unforgettable decade was the conquest of space.” —Guardian, Best Books of the Season

“A crisply dramatic account.” —Sunday Telegraph

“An extraordinary book…as profoundly as any work of philosophy.” —Uncut

“Splendid!” —Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Fascinating…We know what happened inside the Apollo, but what went on inside the astronauts’ minds? Extremely thought-provoking.” —J. G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun and Memories of the Space Age

From the Publisher

02/01/2019

Smith (Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth) chronicles the career of Josh Harris and the dotcom boom and bust of 1990s New York City. The book represents four years of original research, including many meetings and interviews with Harris. It's clear that much work has gone into this volume, but like the monies that were funneled into many failed dotcom businesses, readers may wonder what the point of it all is. For historians of New York, the imagery of the setting is enjoyable and perhaps illuminating. However, Harris, although a fascinating character, is an unsympathetic protagonist, and reading about his life is at times quite tedious. In some ways this work is similar to Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, although Harris is arguably a more sympathetic subject than Jobs. VERDICT For readers who enjoy biographical studies related to Internet history, this will be enjoyable. For those who find aspects of startup culture tiresome, so, too, will be this book, well-written as it is.—Esther Jackson, New York Botanical Garden

Library Journal