Totally Wired

Synopsis

The story of the dotcom bubble, its tumultuous crash, and the visionary pioneer at its centre. One morning in February 2000, 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. During the mid-1990s a group of young people found themselves lords of a new realm called cyberspace. Money was showered upon them to start businesses and instruct elders in the ways of an 'online' world they saw coming, and many became rich beyond their wildest dreams. Between 1995 and March 2000, all rules of sound finance were abandoned and the unthinkable appeared to be happening: twenty-somethings were taking over. And unlike the imagined youth revolutions of the 1950s, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, this one was remaking society for real. But no. Three months into the new millennium investors, as if waking together from a trance, looked down and panicked and in one of the most spectacular financial crashes ever seen, fled the dotcoms until the entire sector had simply. . . vanished. Three trillion dollars was lost to the economy in what became the signature event of the 1990s, while the dotcommers melted away to nowhere, apparent victims of their own hubris and greed. The internet was a joke. Was over. Those five weird years might never have happened. If the mania attending those events is hard to recall, it's because over 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 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. ndrew Smith is the author of the international bestseller Moondust. As a journalist he has written for Melody Maker, The Face, The Sunday Times, Guardian and Observer. He has also written and presented two documentaries for BBC4, Being Neil Armstrong and To Kill a Mockingbird at 50, and the three-part series People of the Abyss for Radio 4.

Copyright:

2012

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781471114731

Publisher:

Simon & Schuster

Date of Addition:

07/25/12

Copyrighted By:

Andrew Smith

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Computers and Internet, Business and Finance

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.